Overview

Although the United States has prioritized its fight against militant groups for two decades, the transnational jihadist movement has proved surprisingly resilient and adaptable. Many analysts and practitioners have underestimated these militant organizations, viewing them as unsophisticated or unchanging despite the ongoing evolution of their tactics and strategies. In Enemies Near and Far, two internationally recognized experts use newly available documents from al-Qaeda and ISIS to explain how jihadist groups think, grow, and adapt. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Thomas Joscelyn recast militant groups as learning organizations, detailing their embrace of strategic, tactical, and technological innovation. Drawing on theories of organizational learning, they provide a sweeping account of these groups' experimentation over time. Gartenstein-Ross and Joscelyn shed light on militant groups' most effective strategic and tactical moves, including attacks targeting aircraft and the use of the internet to inspire and direct lone attackers, and they examine jihadists' ability to shift their strategy based on political context. While militant groups' initial efforts to upgrade their capabilities often fail, these attempts should generally be understood not as failures but as experiments in service of a learning process-a process that continues until these groups achieve a breakthrough. Providing unprecedented historical and strategic perspective on how jihadist groups learn and evolve, Enemies Near and Far also explores how to anticipate future threats, analyzing how militants are likely to deploy a range of emerging technologies.

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Reviews

Very few can master the complexity of the ever-expanding list of local movements, but Gartenstein-Ross and Joscelyn give us an authoritative bird's eye view of jihadism around the globe, with tremendous access and analysis of important primary sources uncovered in their exhaustive research. -- Craig Whiteside, coauthor of <i>The ISIS Reader: Milestone Texts of the Islamic State Movement</i>

Very few can master the complexity of the ever-expanding list of local movements, but Gartenstein-Ross and Joscelyn give us an authoritative bird's eye view of jihadism around the globe, with tremendous access and analysis of important primary sources uncovered in their exhaustive research. -- Craig Whiteside, coauthor of <i>The ISIS Reader: Milestone Texts of the Islamic State Movement</i> Enemies Near and Far offers a compelling explanation for the persistence of Al Qaeda and ISIS despite over 20 years of aggressive U.S. counterterrorism. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Thomas Joscelyn, two leading terrorism experts, explain how jihadist groups innovate and how counterterrorism officials can better anticipate, and disrupt, these deadly organizations. -- Daniel Byman, author of <i>Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad</i> Enemies Near and Far is an impressively comprehensive overview of terrorism around the world in the modern era. Gartenstein-Ross and Joscelyn's excellent theoretical framework provides compelling insights to which every policymaker should pay close attention. -- Yasmin Green, director of research and development at Jigsaw

Author Information

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is the founder and chief executive officer of Valens Global and a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He has led numerous policy projects, including serving as the lead drafter of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s 2019 Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence. His books include My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir (2007). Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he is also senior editor of the Long War Journal. He has served as a consultant for the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division.

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