Terror in Transition: Leadership and Succession in Terrorist Organizations (Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare)

What is the role of founding leaders in shaping terrorist organizations? What follows the loss of this formative leader? These questions are especially important to religious terrorist groups, in which leaders are particularly revered. Tricia L. Bacon and Elizabeth Grimm provide a groundbreaking analysis of how religious terrorist groups manage and adapt to major shifts in leadership. They demonstrate that founders create the base from which their successors operate. Founders establish and explain the group’s mission, and they determine and justify how it seeks to achieve its objectives. Bacon and Grimm argue that how successors position themselves in terms of the founder shapes a terrorist group’s future course. They examine how and why different types of successors choose to pursue incremental or discontinuous change. Bacon and Grimm emphasize that the instability surrounding succession can place a group at its most vulnerable―the precise time to explore options to weaken or defeat it. Bacon and Grimm highlight similarities between Islamic terrorist groups abroad and Christian white nationalist groups such as the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Drawing on extensive field research in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Pakistan, Terror in Transition features detailed analysis of groups such as al-Shabaab, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda in Iraq / the Islamic State in Iraq, as well as the KKK. Offering a rigorous theoretical perspective on terrorist leadership transition, this policy-relevant book provides actionable recommendations for counterterrorism practitioners. "Today's counterterrorism experts are engaged in a spirited debate about whether or not targeting the leader of a known terrorist group is an effective strategy, but in reality, not much is actually known about the organizational and strategic role leaders play in terrorist groups. In this book, security studies experts Tricia Bacon and Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault develop a set of criteria of the techniques that leaders of often decentralized terrorist groups have used to successfully survive and analyze how that criteria has been used in practice by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. These criteria--such as forging partnerships with other groups, articulating a strategic vision, and promoting a clear chain of command--draw from multidisciplinary models of leadership and thus expand the reach of political science and security studies' understanding of how these leaders operate. Further, Bacon and Arsenault point out that by better understanding terrorist leaders, policymakers can make sounder decisions about combating terrorism through methods like countering violent extremism, deradicalization, and targeted combat action. How Terrorist Leaders Matter provides an essential re-working of established ways of thinking about terrorist organizations and how to better counter their reach and influence"-- Provided by publisher Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Literature Review and Research Design 2. Founders: Who Is a Founder, What Does He Do, and Who Comes Next? 3. The Second Ku Klux Klan: From Founder to Fixer 4. Egyptian Islamic Jihad: From Founder to Figureheads, to Fixer, to Visionary 5. Al-Qaida in Iraq/the Islamic State of Iraq: From Founder to Signalers 6. Al-Shabaab: From Founder to Fixer, to Figurehead 7. Pathways and Possibilities: Lessons Learned from the Mini–Case Studies Conclusion Appendix A. Religious Terrorist Groups Appendix B. Summary of Mini–Case Study Data Notes Bibliography Index This book provides a groundbreaking analysis of how religious terrorist groups manage and adapt to major shifts in leadership. It argues that how successors position themselves in terms of the founder shapes a terrorist group’s future course and examines how and why different types of successors choose to pursue incremental or discontinuous change.