Ebook: Taming Terrorism. It’s Been Done Before

Taming Terrorism: It’s Been Done Before is the second in a series of
Policy Exchange publications that seek to draw from past experience
in deciding how best to tackle foreign policy challenges today. The
first – Regime Change – looked at state-building efforts abroad, from
post-war Germany to contemporary Afghanistan. Taming Terrorism
does the same with terrorist movements, from the Boxer Rebellion
of 1899-1901 to Japan’s Aum Shinriykõ and Greece’s November 17th
in the 1990s. Part of its point is to demonstrate that despite the hype
today’s struggle is not an unprecedented one, and in fact has much
in common with episodes in the not so distant past. We’ve beaten
terrorism before, and we can do it again.
As case studies, we picked groups which, like the Islamic
radicals, were primarily driven by ideology rather than by concrete
political demands, and whose aims were so extreme and/or
eccentric as to preclude all possibility of rational negotiation.
Hence separatists – such as the IRA, ETA and PKK – are excluded, as are single-issue groups such as anti-abortionists and anti-vivsectionists.