Does Terrorism Work? — Richard English

English's question is deceptively simple: do terrorist campaigns actually achieve their stated political objectives? Working through four case studies — the IRA, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and ETA — he develops a framework for assessing terrorist success that distinguishes between strategic, partial, tactical, and organisational goals. The answer is more nuanced than either 'terrorism works' or 'terrorism never works', and the method is a model of how to ask a hard political question with intellectual rigour.