THE PROLONGED RELIGIOUS WAVE OF TERRORISM

Abstract

The religious wave of terrorism continues to dominate modern terrorism and pose transnational threats. The religious wave emerged in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, and David Rapoport has identified that if it follows the pattern of its three predecessors, the wave could disappear by 2025. This thesis analyzes the elements that are expected to prolong the wave of religious terrorism beginning with the evaluation of the history of international terrorism. Rapoport’s four main waves of modern terrorism serve as the backdrop for this thesis: first - the anarchist led movement; second - the anti-colonial movement; third - the new leftist movement; and fourth - the current religious wave with Islam at the heart. The five influential elements that determine the success of each wave are the terrorist organizations, diaspora population, states, sympathetic foreign publics, and super national organizations. The resiliency of the dominant terror organization in this wave, the Islamic State, plays a large role in the endurance of this wave. The Islamic State is evaluated against the four principles of the Aristotelian model of causality: material, formal, efficient, and final in order to assess them with a formalized model that adds rigor and completeness to the complex situation.