Terrorism and insurgency in Asia: a contemporary examination of terrorist and separatist movements, edited by Benjamin Schreer and Andrew T. H. Tan, Routledge, 2020, 270 pp., £36.99 (UK) (paperback), ISBN 9780367671402

Critical Studies on Terrorism. 2021. Vol. 14. No. 3. P. 390–392.

Asatryan G., Kalpakian J.

This edited volume is useful for scholars interested in critical approaches to terrorism and security. Written in accessible language, it addresses political and social processes in Asia through four parts and sixteen chapters, which explore the problem of terrorism and insurgency in certain Asian countries. The work relies on empirical research and is well referenced and well structured. The book explains the genesis, evolution, and formation of terrorist and insurgency movements, arguing that state weakness in Asia is one of the main reasons for terrorism and insurgency in the region. State weakness has been shown to increase the risk of civil war considerably. It also decreases the deterrent effect of the government’s coercive instruments and opens the political and military space for discontented groups to use violence to achieve their goals (15). The authors claim that the conditions for civil peace were not present in many Asian states in the early post-colonial period, as the retreating tide of European imperialism after the Second World War created new states across Asia that possessed relatively weak institutions, underdeveloped economies, and military forces that had been intentionally kept under-trained and under-equipped by the colonial governments (16).

Keywords: исламизм, борьба с терроризмом, Азия и Африка, Islamism, ИГИЛ, Asia, ISIS, «Большая Центральная Азия», anti-terrorism