Inside Terrorism

There are books that describe the world, and books that predict it. Bruce Hoffman's Inside Terrorism, published in 1998, belongs emphatically to the second category. He argued that the dominant threat to global security was shifting toward religiously motivated actors for whom violence was a sacred obligation. The book's central thesis is disarmingly clear: terrorism has changed more in its motivations than in its methods. The 'old' terrorism, secular, leftist, ethno-nationalist, constrained by the need to avoid alienating popular support, has given way to a new form driven by transcendent, often apocalyptic imperatives. Hoffman grounds this claim in data, drawing on the RAND-St Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism to demonstrate that religiously motivated groups, though a minority through the 1980s and early 1990s, were responsible for a disproportionate share of fatalities.