The New Threat from Islamic Militancy

"Jason Burke is one of the best. He’s a journalist but he’s also a scholar. He’s spent an enormous amount of time in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in the Middle East. He gets his feet dirty. This book is a historical look at Islamic militancy. It’s wrong to describe the current scale of displacement that people are enduring without mentioning the fact that the convulsions within some parts of the Islamic world are central to the refugee statistics as they are today. It is striking that the IRC was founded by Einstein to rescue Jews from Europe and today forty percent of our work is in Muslim-majority countries: Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. One can’t ignore this part of the story. Equally, as some of the politics in America shows at the moment, it’s easy to get it wrong. That’s why it’s very important that people understand the deep roots of some of the convulsions that are taking place at the moment. Burke weaves together the history of militancy in the twentieth century, the significance of 1979, and the roots of the current conflict in Syria and elsewhere. What I said is that we’re entering ‘a decade of disorder.’ The international system is weaker and more divided than in a generation or longer. While the Cold War was a period of organized division, now we’re in a period of disorganized fragmentation. People talk about a leaderless world; I don’t buy that. But I think it is a period of fragmentation around the world. All countries are turning inwards, not just the United States. The management of the global commons is a global tragedy, whether in security, health, education or the environment."