The definitive account of the career and legacy of the most influential Western exponent of violent jihad.

Anwar al-Awlaki was, according to one of his followers, “the main man who translated jihad into English.” By the time he was killed by an American drone strike in 2011, he had become a spiritual leader for thousands of extremists, especially in the United States and Britain, where he aimed to make violent Islamism “as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea.” Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens draws on extensive research among al-Awlaki’s former colleagues, friends, and followers, including interviews with convicted terrorists, to explain how he established his network and why his message resonated with disaffected Muslims in the West.

A native of New Mexico, al-Awlaki rose to prominence in 2001 as the imam of a Virginia mosque attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers. After leaving for Britain in 2002, he began delivering popular lectures and sermons that were increasingly radical and anti-Western. In 2004 he moved to Yemen, where he eventually joined al-Qaeda and oversaw numerous major international terrorist plots. Through live video broadcasts to Western mosques and universities, YouTube, magazines, and other media, he soon became the world’s foremost English-speaking recruiter for violent Islamism. One measure of his success is that he has been linked to about a quarter of Islamists convicted of terrorism-related offenses in the United States since 2007.

Despite the extreme nature of these activities, Meleagrou-Hitchens argues that al-Awlaki’s strategy and tactics are best understood through traditional social-movement theory. With clarity and verve, he shows how violent fundamentalists are born.

As made abundantly clear in the classified documents recently made public by WikiLeaks, Pakistan is the keystone in the international fight against terrorism today. After the US-led coalition targeted terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan, these groups, including al Qaeda and the Taliban, relocated to the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Pakistan. From its base in this remote, inhospitable region of Pakistan, al Qaeda and its associated cells have planned, prepared, and executed numerous terrorist attacks around the world, in addition to supporting and waging insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.

This book is the first detailed analysis of the myriad insurgent groups working in Pakistan. Written by well-known expert on global terrorism Rohan Gunaratna and Khuram Iqbal, a leading scholar in Pakistan, the book examines and reviews the nature, structure, and agendas of the groups, their links to activists in other countries, such as India and Iran, and the difficulties of defeating terrorism in this part of the world. Drawing on extensive field research and interviews with government officials and former terrorists, the authors argue that Pakistan faces grave and continuing pressures from within, and that without steadfast international goodwill and support, the threats of extremism, terrorism, and insurgency will continue to grow.

This timely and necessary book argues that if the international community is to win the battle against ideological extremism and operational terrorism around the world, then Pakistan should be in the vanguard of the fight.

The missing act in the late nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary drama is played in this pioneering book. Norman Naimark reinterprets the decade of the 1880s as one full of radical underground circles, grouping and regrouping in kaleidoscopic fashion. Along with later celebrated sects, they laid the foundation of Russian Marxism. Naimark is the first Western historian to research systematically the criminal records of the old Ministry of Justice in the Soviet Union. The political cases and trials of some 5,000 anti-czarists form the backbone of the study. The author patiently sorts out these defendants and relates their many histories, especially those of three groups. In broad outline, they were the narodovol’tsy, who believed in terrorism and state power to introduce socialism; the social democrats, who tried to prepare urban workers for a future role in parliamentary institutions; and the populists, who believed in raising people’s consciousness for change. It was the narodovol’tsy, however, who dominated all the revolutionary movements by hewing closest to the radical spirit of the age, that of realizing the “people’s will” by directly attacking to government.

Naimark has written a master guidebook to hitherto uncharted revolutionary territory and a valuable corrective to earlier histories in several languages. In the tradition of high scholarship pioneered by Franco Venturi in his now classic work Roots of Revolution, which covered an earlier period, Terrorists and Social Democrats will lay claim to a place on the small shelf of books illuminating Russian revolutionary politics.