terrorism

Police in New Jersey have located and arrested Ahmad Khan Rahami, the prime suspect in the Chelsea and New Jersey bombings. Rahami fired on the officers who found him, striking two of them and then being shot himself (in the shoulder, possibly). He is now in custody and receiving medical care at a hospital in Newark. And now officials face an important—and potentially quite controversial—set of decisions regarding how to go about interrogating Rahami.

Editor's Note: Although the presidential candidates, our media, and most importantly, Lawfare, tend to focus on the danger from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, right-wing groups have been a more lethal terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland since 9/11 than have jihadists. Michele St-Amant of GWU's Program on Extremism looks at this trend. She focuses on the notorious Ku Klux Klan, perhaps the worst group America has ever produced, and assesses the troubling reasons that explain its resurgence today.

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Editor's Note: There is a popular misconception that the serious study of Islam is a step on the road toward radicalization and terrorism. Christine Fair, Jacob Goldstein, and Ali Hamza (all of whom I'm proud to say share my Georgetown University universe) come up with a heartening finding for those of us who believe knowledge is good: that those who know more about Islam are more resistant to extremist appeals.

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Editor's Note: What if most terrorism isn’t really terrorism? In past decades, much of what we call terrorism today would have been seen as insurgent violence, revolutionary war, or civil war: a group like the Islamic State, which uses tanks as well as suicide bombing, is a prime example of an organization that is wrongly classified as a terrorist group. John Mueller of Ohio State University and Mark Stewart of the University of Newcastle in Australia unpack this definitional confusion and argue that it leads to a gross misunderstanding of the true threat we face.