Global Alert: The Rationality of Modern Islamist Terrorism and the Challenge to the Liberal Democratic World (Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare)

Global Alert describes the motivations that lead to modern Islamist terrorism and the different stages in the execution of a terrorist attack. Challenging the certainty that liberal democratic values offer an antidote to radicalism, the book exposes the exploitation of democratic institutions by terrorists to further their goals and confronts the difficulty democracies face in fighting terrorism, especially when international humanitarian law does not account for nonstate actors in armed conflict. Global Alert especially focuses on the "hybrid terrorist organization" model, which calls for a new international doctrine to neutralize its threat.