68 books like What Terrorists Want

This is a well-argued and illuminating book to understand the complexity of terrorism. Primoratz focuses mostly on what we understand by the term “terrorism” and some of its most important characteristics. In doing so, he offers a definition of terrorism that meshes with our ordinary use of it. So, for him, terrorism is the deliberate use of violence against innocent people to intimidate and coerce others into doing what they otherwise would not do.

One of the virtues of his definition is that it avoids the double standard that policymakers presuppose when they define terrorism solely as the deliberate use of violence by non-state actors. Such a narrow definition of terrorism allows for representatives of states, be they tyrannical or democratic, to engage in vicious violence against innocent noncombatants without assuming moral or legal responsibility for their despicable violent acts that are no less terroristic, sometimes even more so, than… show more.

This is an accessible book for those who want to learn about some of the arguments in favor of a just war tradition and pacifist arguments against any use of political violence. Coady does justice to both traditions. He defends the sometimes neglected or misunderstood “doctrine of double effect” to offer a compelling argument against the deliberate use of terrorist violence by either nonstate or state actors against innocent non-combatants. While not popular nowadays, Coady makes a compelling case that unless we take the doctrine of double effect seriously, noncombatant immunity would be significantly reduced. Our ordinary intuition shows that if we remove the idea of intentionality from evaluating people’s behavior, especially in war, we are virtually giving a carte blanch for all parties involved to deliberately target the innocent. 

O’Donovan offers us a short but elegantly written book on just war from antiquity to the present. He convincingly argues in favor of the foundational role that religious and theological ideas going back to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas play in the development of a Christian just war approach. He underscores that what we have come to understand as “just war theory” is a misnomer. There is no such thing as just war theory but rather a proposal of practical reason to develop good judgments in the light of armed conflict or war. The backbone of these good judgments is that the deliberate killing of innocent noncombatants is never morally justified. This prohibition remains constant whether we are dealing with counterinsurgency, the development and use of weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism. 

Fotion has written a short and accessible book for a general audience defending the relevance of just war theory to address issues of war. He distinguished between two different conceptions of just war: one that applies to interstate armed conflicts and one that applies between states and non-state actors. While the distinction between interstate armed conflicts and those between state and non-state actors might be useful at times, the principles of jus ad bellum (the right to wage war) based on the right of self-defense and jus in bello (the right way to wage war) based on respecting the immunity of innocent civilians remains constant in both types of armed conflict. Yet since he explores the nuances of both approaches, his book is a welcome development illustrating the relevance of the just war tradition nowadays.

With this year’s 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, this book, published on the 10th anniversary, is a useful reminder of the events of that day and the subsequent investigations of why it happened.

The civil case against Saudi Arabia for alleged complicity with the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi, continues, albeit with little publicity. That is likely to change. Osama bin Laden’s own legal reckoning was less formal of course – the Saudi whose name has become synonymous with terrorism died in a hail of bullets from U.S. Navy SEALs. (I can also recommend the movie of that event Zero Dark Thirty.)

For those of us who lived through 9/11, it’s easy to forget that kids in school today weren’t even born in 2001; to them, the events of 9/11 are ancient history. I Survived is the kind of book that can jump-start their interest by dropping them right into the thick of the events of that day. Lucas is a football-obsessed teen who makes a series of completely relatable bad decisions that leave him right at Ground Zero just as the planes hit the towers. Told in age-appropriate but heart-stopping detail, this book captures a perfect snapshot of the confusion, fear, heroism, and resolve on display that extraordinary day. 

Unlike the other books on this list, this isn’t primarily a reprint collection of early-twentieth-century comics. Rather, Art Spiegelman (whose essential memoir Maus was the first comic to win a Pulitzer Prize), re-introduces old comics characters in a very personal story of the 9/11 attacks and the political fallout. Figures like the Happy Hooligan, Jiggs and Maggie, Little Nemo, and Krazy Kat and Ignatz float through these stories like New York City’s awakened ghosts. Spiegelman also adds a masterful essay on comics and curates a few selections of the original strips. No work better demonstrates how the early cartoonists can speak through the rubble of history with vitality and humor.

The Zero captures the paranoia and confusion following 9/11, before we knew who attacked us or why. The story’s amnesiac investigator stumbles from one confusing clue to the next, much as we all did in those dark days. As he tries to piece together the truth from the literal scraps left behind at the World Trade Center, he also seeks insight into his own identity, and into the nation’s.

Anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani wrote Good Muslim, Bad Muslim shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The book is a rebuttal of the U.S. government’s justifications for the War on Terror and military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which relied heavily on the inaccurate notion that terrorism is a product of anti-modern passions embedded in Islamic culture. Mamdani uses history as a corrective, illustrating how such “culture talk” has deep roots in European imperialism, and how a violent strand of political Islam emerged from modern anticolonial movements in the Middle East and gained global influence amid U.S. covert military operations in the second half of the Cold War, particularly in Afghanistan. I learn something new every time I reread this fantastic book for my U.S. and International Terrorism history course. 

In a book that was published before its time, Vince Flynn fictionalizes what some knew to be true many years ago: that the members of the Saudi royal family financed those who had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. Now that the curtains have been opened on these pieces of intelligence, this book is even more of a great read. Enemy of the State is written by perhaps one of the best spycraft authors of our time, and chronicles a former Special Operator who has been sent to Saudi Arabia to uncover the evidence of one of the greatest betrayals in history. Finding himself double-crossed and in a foreign land, he must fight and escape both the Saudi and American intelligence agencies & their networks to stay alive and bring the truth to the world.