Terrorism’s Persistence in South Asia and Pakistan

This book explores the paradoxical endurance of terrorism, which continues to exist despite often failing to achieve its central goals. Multifaceted and wide-ranging in scope, the analysis comprehensively surveys a range of global contexts from the last two centuries, where long-term terrorism has prevailed, and systematically identifies various terrorism-sustaining determinants.

Using South Asia as a case study, the chapters trace the etymology, origins, and the study of terrorism within Colonial India, during its partition and post-independence period. An in-depth study of pre-post-9/11 persistent terrorism in Pakistan – the second-most adversely impacted country globally by terrorism – links the phenomenon's broader historical patterns and contemporary causes to explain terrorism's contentious efficacy contextually and theoretically, and to resolve the persistence-inefficacy paradox. This book makes two significant contributions: it fills a critical, empirical, methodological, and theoretical gap in understanding the paradoxical persistence of terrorism, while also underscoring the need for specific recognition of this violence genre as a distinct sub-phenomenon warranting dedicated study.

Offering a fresh perspective from a scholar based in the Global South, the book will be of interest to researchers, analysts, academics and postgraduate students of South Asian Politics, international security, and terrorism and political violence studies more broadly.