Coming to terms with terrorism

Any review article has an element of pot luck. An editor receives volumes for review, sorts them into piles according to subject and then thinks of a possible reviewer. The reviewer suggests a few additions and the parameters of the article are set. They are set by what publishers think will sell at a particular time and, more rarely, by what publishers and their academic advisers think ought to be published. A review article is thus frequently about a fashionable topic with a strong emphasis on the current state of conventional wisdom as reflected in the contemporary literature. Terrorism is a topic which fits this bill. It is constantly in the headlines and not surprisingly it has generated some scholarly interest.