Terror in Transition : : Leadership and Succession in Terrorist Organizations / / Elizabeth Grimm, Tricia Bacon.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2022
• VerfasserIn: Bacon, Tricia,; Grimm, Elizabeth,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

What is the role of founding leaders in shaping terrorist organizations? What follows the loss of this formative leader? These questions are especially important to religious terrorist groups, in which leaders are particularly revered.Tricia L. Bacon and Elizabeth Grimm provide a groundbreaking analysis of how religious terrorist groups manage and adapt to major shifts in leadership. They demonstrate that founders create the base from which their successors operate. Founders establish and explain the group’s mission, and they determine and justify how it seeks to achieve its objectives. Bacon and Grimm argue that how successors position themselves in terms of the founder shapes a terrorist group’s future course. They examine how and why different types of successors choose to pursue incremental or discontinuous change. Bacon and Grimm emphasize that the instability surrounding succession can place a group at its most vulnerable—the precise time to explore options to weaken or defeat it.Bacon and Grimm highlight similarities between Islamic terrorist groups abroad and Christian white nationalist groups such as the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Drawing on extensive field research in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Pakistan, Terror in Transition features detailed analysis of groups such as al-Shabaab, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda in Iraq / the Islamic State in Iraq, as well as the KKK. Offering a rigorous theoretical perspective on terrorist leadership transition, this policy-relevant book provides actionable recommendations for counterterrorism practitioners.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- Chapter One LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH DESIGN -- Chapter Two FOUNDERS Who Is a Founder, What Does He Do, and Who Comes Next? -- Chapter Three THE SECOND KU KLUX KLAN From Founder to Fixer -- Chapter Four EGYPTIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD From Founder to Figureheads to Fixer to Visionary -- Chapter Five AL-QAIDA IN IRAQ/THE ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ From Founder to Signalers -- Chapter Six AL-SHABAAB From Founder to Fixer to Figurehead -- Chapter Seven PATHWAYS AND POSSIBILITIES Lessons Learned from the Mini–Case Studies -- CONCLUSION -- Appendix A RELIGIOUS TERRORIST GROUPS -- Appendix B SUMMARY OF MINI–CASE STUDY DATA -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX