商王朝恐怖主义策略起源与兴衰背景--同中美洲阿兹特克帝国恐怖主义策略比较分析

文章分析了商王朝恐怖主义策略在商代政治领域的兴衰及背景,结合同中美洲阿兹特克帝国恐怖主义策略及其历史背景的对比观察,认识到恐怖主义在国策中作用的兴衰,同有关统治者的统治自信心强弱程度以及周围政治环境对他压力的大小息息相关。当一个原本弱小的文化在短期内拥有和控制广大疆域和众多民族的国家时,恐怖主义策略是常被采用的统治方法之一。     

Just War and Terrorism: A New Policy Perspective

The idea of terrorism as policy in any policy discussion is abhorrent in most academic circles. The fact is, however, if one removes the emotion attached to the use of terrorism and approaches it as a tool it can be placed in several models used by policymakers today. For many centuries the concept of “just war” has been discussed by philosophers, policymakers, and warriors. When standards have been established that those engaged in conflict can use to determine whether or not an action is considered “just.” How did Christianity in particular move from emphasizing love (agapē, caritas) to the acceptance of waging war? This problem was dealt with when the law of war was included in discussion of natural law theory.     

The Geopolitics of Terrorism: A Commentary on Flint and Radil's Approach

An American political geographer and prominent specialist in electoral geography presents a measured and informative critique of the preceding paper by Colin Flint and Steven M. Radil (2009) on "Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Situating al-Qaeda and the Global War on Terror within Geopolitical Trends and Structures." Among the issues explored are the extent to which the observed patterns of terrorism might differ depending on whether "international" or "domestic" incidents are the focus of attention, and whether fatalities associated with incidents might prove a better metric of terrorism's psychological impact than per capita incident frequency alone. A deeper issue debated in the critique involves the thorny question of whether a singular focus on relative economic deprivation (and on its variations between countries rather than also within countries) offers an adequate explanation for the incidence of terrorism given the complexity of cultural (including ethnicity and religion), social, economic, and political factors that motivate terrorist acts in diverse settings across the world. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I390, O100, Y900. 32 references.     

Terrorism and Imperial Decline: The Ottoman-Armenian Case

This article places Armenian nationalist terrorism into the broader sociopolitical context of the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. It considers the agendas and methods of the nationalists and the relationship between their actions, great power intervention and state violence.     

A Critique in Search of a Corpus: Re-visiting Governance and Re-interpreting Urban Politics

One of the most profound changes of the last two decades has been in the form and the function of local government. Its role as part of the local state has been challenged through the re-scaling and re-configuration of many of its aims. This paper examines the growth of business sector involvement and the ascendancy of the partnership model in urban development, as part of an analysis of the changes and the continuities that stretch across the local government – local governance conceptualization of political relations. I start the paper with a discussion of the main issues in the local governance literature as a precursor to a commentary onImrie and Raco's (1999) recent paper, 'How New is the New Local Governance? Lessons from the United Kingdom'. The wider literature is drawn upon to discuss some of the theoretical approaches used to analyse this much-vaunted transformation and three key themes are used to structure the remainder of the paper. I argue that Imrie and Raco caricature the work of other academics in order to make their claims over omissions from the literature. In doing so, they ignore or under-play how state restructuring and the logic of capital has often been the object of analysis, rather that the voluntarist incorporation of business élites into the local governing apparatus. Using empirical examples from three English cities I argue that while, on the one hand, their examples are revealing and serve to sensitize current debates around governance, the state and regulation, on the other hand, there is still a need to interpret these 'local' politics within a broader and more scale-sensitive framework and in more abstract terms. This demands a clear distinction between local governance as a concept, and its investigation in an empirical way.     

Somalia and Yemen: The Links between Terrorism and State Failure

The scope of this study is to demonstrate that the failed state scheme of Somalia has not been and is not a safe haven for the al‐Qaeda, an issue that has been already displayed in Ken Menkhaus's excellent study (2004 ). Within this context, the article will consider the Somali Islamist political landscape in contrast and in relation to the current situation in Yemen, and thus, it aims to support the premise that weak states, such as Yemen, rather than “collapsed” states, can be incubators of international terrorism. In addition, while studying the interactions between Somalia and Yemen, we will attempt to answer some other important questions arising from this relationship: (1) does the emergence of al‐Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al‐Shabaab have potential convergence; and (2) why is piracy a cross‐border phenomenon and how is it connected to radical Islamism?     

Terrorism and the banlieues: the Charlie Hebdo attacks in context

In January 2015, French society was shocked by a sequence of fatal attacks at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris. In the wake of these tragic events, many social and political commentators interpreted the killings as an assault on freedom of expression and core French values of liberty, equality and laïcité. Prime Minister Manuel Valls described the perpetrators as disciples of Islamofascism. More than this, the terrorists were represented as the extreme manifestation of a deviant and nihilistic ‘other’—largely concentrated in France’s infamous banlieues—that rejected the Republic and embraced a form of ideological extremism that originated beyond France’s borders. Yet this interpretation fails to adequately consider the complexity of the situation. Drawing on the work on radicalisation by Wiktorowicz, and illustrated with lessons learned from research into the causes of the 2005 French riots, this article has two objectives: to highlight the importance of everyday exclusion in the web of causal factors that frames the path to violent extremism in France; and to offer an alternative view of the role and influence of the banlieues in this context.