The challenge of nonterritorial and virtual conflicts

"In this paper, esteemed terrorism expert Dr. Stephen Sloan provides a learned narrative about the scholarship and doctrine concerning terrorism and insurgency. In offering his thoughts about the well chronicled flow of terrorism analysis, he identifies how recent trends should be affecting counterterrorism doctrine and policy. In the concluding chapters he provides his views for improving upon the traditional approaches in order to deal with international and virtual threats. The premise of Dr. Sloan's paper is that terrorism in the 21st century has become predominately international in nature, riding on the back of opportunities provided by new technologies in cyberspace, aerospace, and the Internet. He suggests that traditional concepts for countering terrorism and insurgency are not effective in dealing with contemporary terrorism in its modern form as a nonterritorially based insurgency. Concerning the notion of a global insurgency, Dr. Sloan's analysis runs parallel with scholars such as Rohan Gunaratna, Richard Shultz, and David Kilcullen whose recent writings address the issues of terrorism and global insurgency."--P. ix.