in the ideology that the groups espoused, for terrorism were a reaction against two
of the main components of the world leader’s “innovation.” First, the nationalist
movements shared, if somewhat loosely, a belief that “imperialism” in the form of the
domination of the rich countries over the poor remained. The rhetoric of the movements
pointed to the Vietnam War as evidence, and in sum argued that the United States had
reneged on its promises of national self-determination, a key element of its world leader-
ship “innovation.” Second, the Marxist framework for many of the terrorist groups in
this period reflected an ideological and armed challenge to the “promises” of capitalism
that the US used in the Cold War.
The fourth wave of terrorism (1990s–present) portends a much more dramatic
geographical change with severe implications for both acts of terrorism and the effec-
tiveness and implications of counter-terrorism. For Rapoport, the fourth wave of
terrorism is the period of religious terrorism, though terrorism motivated by nationalism
is far from gone. The geography of goals and beliefs of religious terrorists goes beyond
international connections; it is a geography that “transcends the state,” perhaps the state
as political agent is irrelevant to this form of terrorism.
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Buddhist religions are all tainted by groups who
utilize a fundamentalist view of the belief system to justify acts of terrorism
(Juergensmeyer, 2000). In other words, religious terrorism is a contemporary global
phenomenon, and not limited to one particular religion, as politically motivated claims
against Islam, especially, suggest. Religious terrorists are fighting a “cosmic war”; a war
of good against evil in which the adjudicator is God or another form of supreme being,
and the terrorists are merely the soldiers conducting God’s will (Juergensmeyer, 2000).
The battle, in the case of religious terrorism, is for people’s souls and not a secular polit-
ical agenda. The state may be the source of acts deemed “evil” but the state is not the
answer, for that one has to turn to salvation and a different world.
Terrorism motivated by religious fundamentalism is a particularly dangerous form
of terrorism. It is more likely to invoke terrorist acts that produce a large number of
casualties and be less sympathetic to overtures of conflict resolution than the previous
waves of terrorism (Juergensmeyer, 2000). Why? To understand this dreary prediction,
we have to consider the way the state has dominated both geopolitical practice and
analysis throughout the twentieth century. Geopolitical actors have seen the state to be
the key structure that both constrains or motivates their actions, but it has also been seen
I N T R O D U C T I O N T O G E O P O L I T I C S
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