Two years before the September 11 attacks against the United States in 2001, the pre-eminent historian of terrorism, Walter Laqueur, noted that a ‘revolution’ in the character of terrorism was taking place. Rather than the vicious yet calculated application of violence that everyone had become familiar with, the world was now confronted with terrorists whose aim was ‘to liquidate all satanic forces [and destroy] all life on earth’.

Terrorism, according to Laqueur, had become catastrophic. Not only would the ‘new terrorists’ have no inhibitions about using nuclear weapons, their aim was to construct ‘earthquake machines’ and launch ‘artificial meteors with which to bombard the earth’. None of Laqueur’s more outlandish predictions have come true.

Nevertheless, Laqueur was not the only expert who sensed that the nature of terrorism was changing. During the 1990s, many of the groups which had kept governments busy during the 1970s and 1980s had decided to abandon violence. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) recognised Israel and renounced the use of terrorism. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland called a permanent ceasefire and entered government. And in April 1998, even the German Red Army Faction (RAF) finally declared its campaign to be over, announcing that ‘the urban guerrilla in the form of the RAF is now history’.

At the same time, new and more dangerous forms of terrorism appeared to be on the rise. In early 1993, a group of Islamist extremists led by Ramzi Yousef launched the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York, aiming to kill thousands. Two years later, a Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, attempted to hasten the apocalypse by contaminating the Tokyo underground with the nerve gas Sarin. Just one month later, an American right-wing extremist, Timothy McVeigh, set off a large truck bomb in Oklahoma City which killed 168 people.

Though undoubtedly shocking in their scale and execution, the September 11 attacks merely confirmed this trend. The trouble was that none of the (self-styled) experts could provide a coherent explanation for what was happening. What exactly did the ‘new terrorism’ consist of? Where did it come from? And how should it be fought? With the notable exception of the American scholar Bruce Hoffman, who traced some of the key developments with great insight and precision, the idea of ‘new terrorism’ was often used as a slogan which signalled that things were different from the past but provided no real explanation of how and why things had changed.

In my new book Old and New Terrorism I am trying to shed light on some of the questions which many experts have failed to answer. My investigation begins with a look at the three areas in which terrorism has changed.

First, terrorist groups have become more diffuse. Traditionally, many terrorist groups adopted hierarchical systems of organisation with clear lines of command and control. Even groups like the IRA and the Basque group ETA, which had decided in favour of a supposedly more flexible ‘cell’ system, were fully integrated into the chain of command. In the IRA’s case, for example, access to explosives was controlled by the group’s regional commanders, thus making sure that none of the cells could carry out a bombing without the leadership’s knowledge and approval.

By contrast, the structures of the ‘new terrorism’ are far more difficult to grasp. They are often described as networks rather than as organisations, because formal hierarchies have been replaced with personal relationships. What matters is not someone’s formal rank but whom they know and what connections they can facilitate. Although truly ‘leaderless resistance’ continues to be quite rare, the difficulty in tracing terrorist attacks such as Al Qaeda’s bombings in Madrid and London to any conventional ‘leadership’ illustrates quite how messy and confused terrorist group structures have become in recent years.

Another novelty lies in how terrorist organisations are increasingly transnational in orientation, not only reaching across borders but creating an entirely new kind of social space. For the ‘old’, territorially based groups such as ETA and the IRA, everything related back to the struggle in their homeland, even when they went abroad in order to buy weapons, train, or raise money.

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, can be described as truly ‘de-territorialised’. When studying Al Qaeda members, the French scholar Olivier Roy found that – typically – ‘the country where their family comes from, the country of residence and radicalisation, and the country of action’ are all different. Furthermore, the group’s ‘centre of gravity’ has constantly shifted – often across continents – depending on where members and their leaders believe victory is most likely.

The second significant difference between ‘old’ and ‘new’ is the rise of religiously motivated terrorism. The ideologies of terrorist groups are often mistakenly thought of as existing in a space completely separate from the (non-violent) political mainstream. In reality, terrorists’ political ideas always reflect a given society’s radical ideological currents, with the obvious difference that terrorists are pursuing their (radical) ends through violent means.

It should come as no surprise, then, that – in the 1960s and 1970s – when most of the radical social and political movements were either Marxist or nationalist, these ideologies were also dominant among the terrorist groups of the time. Indeed, almost all of the ‘old’ European terrorists were one or the other – often, in fact, they were both.

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