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Counterterrorism between the Wars: An International History, 1919–1937
The 11 September 2001 attacks in the US changed the course of world history and made Al-Qaeda a state-like actor in international affairs, thereby confounding a core Realist idea. The event also increased interest in terrorism studies, creating two competing schools of thought within it, the classical and the critical school. The debates between these two broad perspectives have led to many fruitful advances and insights concerning the motivations, methods, and impact of both terrorism and counter-terrorism. Nevertheless, the field has lacked a solid foundation in the use of historical examples, save for a few books and articles. Twentieth-century terrorism, particularly the terrorism of the inter-War years, remains a forgotten phenomenon in understanding the contemporary phenomenon of international terrorism. As Hannah Arendt wrote, violence is a companion of existence,1 so it behoves scholars to look at that period of time closely as well. Mary Barton’s Counterterrorism between the Wars is designed to address this apparent gap in the literature. The First World War had completely damaged the certainties of the antebellum. There were millions of civilian and military casualties, the collapse of the AustroHungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, the establishment of a Bolshevik regime in the former Russian Empire, civil conflicts, untold food shortages and forced migrations. The era was also marked by a dramatic increase in anti-colonialist and antiimperialist sentiments in Asia and Africa. Globally, the desperation helped feed the chances for terrorism, and it did materialize. It led to significant and ongoing counterterrorism programes by all major states. Indeed, the inter-War years were marked by dramatic levels of both terrorism and social banditry. The calamity represented by the Second World War obscured people’s memories of that era, and the spike in terrorism of these twenty years was largely forgotten by 1945 (p.181).