The New Normal? Terrorist Governors and Transnational Civil Wars by Amichai Magen - Carnegie Europe
New actors are contesting the basic norms of statehood, borders, and non-intervention at the local, state, regional, and global levels. But is Europe prepared?
Analysts of violent conflict have long recognized that the causes and nature of war and terrorism change dramatically over time and that transition periods from one era to another often render earlier understandings of conflict practically obsolete.
The fact that the causal mechanisms of violent conflict shift substantially across historical epochs represents a central challenge for policymakers seeking to better predict and prevent the onset of violent conflict and governance breakdowns. Revolutions in economic production, innovations in military technology, and the shifting power distributions among major players in the international system—as well as the number and strength of the alliances between them—can be major drivers of conflict in one era, yet causes of peace in another.
Fortunately, the post-World War II decline in wars between powerful states, by far the most lethal conflicts—continues, for the moment. But other types of political violence are threatening the security of the EU and its member states. Not only did terrorist incidents rise globally by over one-thousand percent between the 9/11 attacks and 2017; when we examine modern terrorism, we can identify quite distinct “splitting events” that demarcate qualitatively different eras of terrorist waves, each with its own motivating ideology, goals, tactics, technologies, media, and funding sources…