Pragmatic Terrorism: Challenging Common Assumptions
By Luciano Pollichieni
Review of:
Jihad & Co.: Black Market and Islamist Power by Ahmad, Aisha, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 336 pp., $31.95 hardback 9780190656775
Everything You Have Told Me is True: the many faces of Al‐Shabaab by Harper, Mary, London: Hurst Publishers 2019, 208 pp., $27.35 hardback 2089781787381247
Both books successfully deconstruct common assumptions on modern terrorist groups. They show precisely how the support and adherence to such organisations cannot be explained only by the adherence to a Salafi‐jihadi ideology by their members and they demonstrate the reasons behind the rise of jihadi proto‐states, which are based on very pragmatic reasons.