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Examines ideas of violence in German culture after 9/11 through the lens of \"violence elsewhere\" - exploring works and discourses about violence in distant locations or times. Following the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, in postwar Germany thinking or speaking about that extreme violence seemed distinctively difficult - even perhaps, at times, impossible. Yet we can learn about understandings of violence in this period in novel ways by exploring images and constructions in German culture of faraway violence, as shown in the recent volume Violence Elsewhere 1: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany, 1945-2001. As of September 11, 2001, violence came to appear transnationally, spectacularly mobile in new ways. Consequently, Violence Elsewhere 2 explores ideas about \"violence elsewhere\" in German-language culture since 2001. Here, \"elsewhere\" can mean not only distant places; it may also be violence perceived as foreign, or in the past. Simultaneously, this work suggests that the idea of 9/11 as a watershed in thinking about violence is more complex than meets the eye. Here, nine essays consider classic literary forms like poetry and prose fiction, from the short story to the intergenerational German family novel to Black feminist speculative fiction. Contributors examine, too, philosophy, performance and multimedia art, political and other forms of public discourse, and film. Topics include, amongst others, the \"war on terror,\" slow environmental violence, the Armenian genocide, portrayals of refugees and migrants, legacies of colonial violence, space travel, and the persistent resonance of the German past. Contributors: Sofía Forchieri, Susanne C. Knittel, Marie Kolkenbrock, Priscilla Layne, Joanne Leal, Francesca Lewis, Frauke Matthes, Lizzie Stewart, Nicola Thomas, and Kathrin Wunderlich. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

This article examines Fatah’s strategic and ideological evolution during the 1970s and early 1980s, focusing on its adoption of Islamic discourse to strengthen internal cohesion and broaden its influence. It explores how this shift shaped Fatah’s political and military strategies, contributing to its identity formation and support within the Palestinian and Arab public. The findings underscore the role of ideological flexibility in navigating geopolitical dynamics and forging alliances with Islamist factions, including Hezbollah, highlighting the nuanced interplay between pragmatism and ideology in national liberation movements. The study focuses on understanding how Fatah’s adoption of Islamic discourse influenced its political and military strategies during this period. By incorporating Islamic myths and symbols, Fatah not only strengthened internal cohesion but also expanded its influence among young Islamists eager to engage in the Palestinian struggle. This research addresses the central question: How did the adoption of Islamic discourse shape Fatah’s political and military strategies during its transition from Jordan to Lebanon, and how did it contribute to the movement’s identity formation and its success in garnering support among the Palestinian and broader Arab public?

This article examines Communist Albania's support for the Palestinian cause and the relationships Tirana cultivated with the various groups comprising the Palestinian national movement. It explores the latter's motivation for cultivating relations with Albania, a tiny Communist country that refused the logic of the bipolar world, both in its alliance with China and, later, through its disengagement from the East-West conflict and retreat into self-imposed isolationism. The article shows that, following Albania's break with the Soviet bloc in the 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and specifically Fatah, was a more natural and logical choice for Tirana's support than other, more self-avowedly left-wing Palestinian organizations. This study is based on primary sources from the archives of the Albanian foreign affairs ministry and the Party of Labour of Albania, as well as secondary sources such as accounts by members of the Albanian military who trained Fatah guerrilla fighters.

Recently, a number of studies have looked at the disengagement/de-radicalisation of terrorist groups and individuals. This article critically assesses part of this literature in relation to the process of voluntary collective disengagement, using the case of the Palestinian Fatah organization as an example. It questions the specific focus of most de-radicalisation studies upon solely ending the use of the terrorist tactic, arguing that the disengagement process should be studied in conjunction with groups ceasing to use other forms of political violence as well. Although the article favours an objective definition of terrorism, it also recognises the salience of the term's normative power and argues that both perspectives can play a role in the disengagement process. This process can be divided into a number of stages: (i) declarative disengagement, (ii) behavioural disengagement, (iii) organisational disengagement, and (iv) de-radicalisation. Fatah's disengagement process demonstrates that the process can be conditional, reversible, and selective. Consequently, a number of problems arise in terms of defining when an organisation has actually ceased to use terrorism and other forms of political violence. The article argues that Fatah represents a case of mixed disengagement; it was selective, conditional and mostly only behavioural. However, despite the disengagement process only being partially successful during the Oslo period - and reversed considerably during the al-Aqsa Intifada - it has had some lasting effects on the organisation, making it less likely to re-engage in terrorism.

The essay explores three recently published books on the origins of militancy in Kashmir. In short, they all find that two causal factors are responsible for the insurgency’s ability to endure. First, the unending muscular security policy of India coupled with its explicit integrationist approach that triggered alienation by squeezing the democratic space of Kashmiris. Second, the role played by Pakistan in strongly backing the menagerie of militant groups for weakening political and territorial control of India over Kashmir. These books rely on a series of case studies of the different militant groups that have operated in Kashmir: most notably, Al-Fatah, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), Hizbul Mujahedeen (HM) and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT). The emergence of Al-Fatah and JKLF was an offshoot of New Delhi’s iron-fist approach compounded with the dwindling of democratic space. Pakistan played a major role in the creation of HM and LeT by invoking Islam and Muslim identity as mobilising factors. These books, in their own different ways, identify a teleological shift in the thinking, strategies and operations of the militant groups, and this essay tries to extrapolate this by outlining the key markers of distinction between the old and new militancy.

How do terrorist groups control their members? Do the tools groups use to monitor their operatives and enforce discipline create security vulnerabilities that governments can exploit?The Terrorist's Dilemmais the first book to systematically examine the great variation in how terrorist groups are structured. Employing a broad range of agency theory, historical case studies, and terrorists' own internal documents, Jacob Shapiro provocatively discusses the core managerial challenges that terrorists face and illustrates how their political goals interact with the operational environment to push them to organize in particular ways. Shapiro provides a historically informed explanation for why some groups have little hierarchy, while others resemble miniature firms, complete with line charts and written disciplinary codes. Looking at groups in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, he highlights how consistent and widespread the terrorist's dilemma--balancing the desire to maintain control with the need for secrecy--has been since the 1880s. Through an analysis of more than a hundred terrorist autobiographies he shows how prevalent bureaucracy has been, and he utilizes a cache of internal documents from al-Qa'ida in Iraq to outline why this deadly group used so much paperwork to handle its people. Tracing the strategic interaction between terrorist leaders and their operatives, Shapiro closes with a series of comparative case studies, indicating that the differences in how groups in the same conflict approach their dilemmas are consistent with an agency theory perspective. The Terrorist's Dilemmademonstrates the management constraints inherent to terrorist groups and sheds light on specific organizational details that can be exploited to more efficiently combat terrorist activity.

Kuttab discusses the identity of Fatah and Palestinian Authority (PA). From its early days, Fatah was the largest Palestinian faction and viewed itself as the leader of the Palestinian national movement. It lacked a doctrinaire ideology, as most of the other factions had, and included political views that ranged from leftist Marxist, Leninists to conservative Muslim Brotherhood types. After Fatah won the first elections held for the Palestinian National Authority, the confusion over the identity of Fatah increased since Arafat was the head of Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, and the PLO, to boot.

Concerns about lying and sincerity in politics are common in most societies, as are concerns about conspiracy theories. But in the occupied Palestinian territory, these concerns give rise to particular kinds of effects because of the conditions of Israeli occupation. Political theorists often interpret opacity claims and conspiracy theories as responses to social disorder. In occupied Palestine, disorder and instability are standard. Opacity claims and conspiracy theories therefore require a different kind of analysis. Through an examination of the semiotic ideology of sincerity, especially as it has emerged in the conflict between Fatah and Hamas, this article argues that opacity claims act as a form of nationalist pedagogy, at once reinforcing the basic principles of sincerity of action and word, and encouraging a wariness of political spin.

Many in the United States and Israel believe that Hamas is nothing but a terrorist organization, and that its social sector serves merely to recruit new supporters for its violent agenda. Based on Sara Roy's extensive fieldwork in the Gaza Strip and West Bank during the critical period of the Oslo peace process, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza shows how the social service activities sponsored by the Islamist group emphasized not political violence but rather community development and civic restoration.

Scholars of political terrorism generally agree that the radical group is usually a splinter faction of an opposition movement. Seldom, however, is an attempt made to incorporate insights and tools from the literature on social movements and contentious politics into the study of the process by which a faction splinters from the larger opposition movement and adopts terrorist tactics—a process commonly known as radicalization. Drawing upon the relational approach from the literature on contentious politics, this article seeks to further understanding of radicalization by examining how and when relational mechanisms, operating in their respective relational arenas, interact and combine to drive it. Proposed is a relational framework for a comparative analysis of radicalization at three levels—domestic, ethno-national, and international—employing the case of the Weather Underground, Fatah-Tanzim, and al-Qaeda respectively.