New Books in Terrorism and Organized Crime

Garrett GraffView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Public Policy] How has the FBI evolved since the days of chasing gangsters and bootleggers, and is it equipped to face the challenges of a global war on terror? According to Garrett Graff's The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror (Little Brown, 2011), the FBI has come a long way since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, but it still has a ways to go. The author, the editor of the most excellent Washingtonian magazine (for which I occasionally write – see here and here), looks at the evolution of the FBI into an organization that is very different from the Hollywood vision of the buttoned-down Bureau. In our interview, we talk about the Bin Laden raid, Hoover's funeral, the Munich Olympics, the Gorelick Wall, the NYPD, and Operation Goldenrod. Read all about it, and more, in Graff's sweeping new book. Please become a fan of "New Books in Public Policy" on Facebook if you haven't already.

Audrey Kurth CroninView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History] It's one thing to say that the study of history is "relevant" to contemporary problems; it's another to demonstrate it. In How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns(Princeton UP, 2009), Audrey Kurth Cronin does so in splendid fashion. She poses a common and very important question: what should we do about modern terrorism in general and Al-Qaeda in particular? To answer this query, she poses another (and quite original) question: how do terrorist campaigns usually end? The logic is simple and compelling: if we want to stop a terrorist campaign, we would do well to understand how terrorist campaigns generally stop. To do this, she reviews the history of modern terrorist campaigns, analyses the means by which they ended, and then presents an original typology of endings. With said typology, she can tell us what works in terms of anti-terrorism and what doesn't in what circumstances. For example, her research shows that "decapitating" Al-Qaeda won't work; other leaders will (and already have) sprung up to continue the terror campaign. Neither will negotiating with Al-Qaeda work because: a) there is no one to negotiate with and b) Al-Qaeda has no coherent list of demands. The cases Cronin examines suggest an entirely different approach, one that promotes the (already on-going) disintegration of Al-Qaeda from within. Al-Qaeda, Cronin says, is showing signs of imploding; we should just help it along. This is a rich book and a model of how to use history for policy-making. I think I'll send President Obama a copy. Please become a fan of "New Books in History" on Facebook if you haven't already.

Stewart BakerView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Public Policy] How do government officials decide key homeland security questions? How do those decisions affect our day to day lives? In Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren't Stopping Tomorrow's Terrorism (Hoover Institution, 2010), Stewart Baker, a former senior official from the Department of Homeland Security, takes us behind the scenes of government homeland security decision making. Baker, who was the DHS's first Assistant Secretary for Policy, examines some of the key security threats the US faces, and some of our greatest challenges in meeting them. While Baker has a healthy respect for the abilities of outside forces would do us harm, he also recognizes that some of our greatest challenges to providing security come from our allies, and from ourselves. In addition, while many people tune out when they hear acronyms like CFIUS of VWP, Baker shows what those acronyms mean, and their implications for our safety and security. Read all about it, and more, in Baker's informative new book. Please become a fan of "New Books in Public Policy" on Facebook if you haven't already.

View on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History] When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were from the mean streets of New York City (The Doors were from the soft parade of L.A….); they hung out with Andy Warhol (The Beatles hung out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi…); they had a female drummer (The Grateful Dead had two drummers, but that still didn't help…); and, of course, they did heroin. Or at least they wrote a famous song about it. We did not do heroin, but we thought that those who did–like Lou Reed and the rest–were hipper than hip. I imagine we would have done it if there had been any around (thank God for small favors). We thought we had discovered something new. But as Eric C. Schneider points out in his marvelous Smack: Heroin and the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), the conjunction of music, heroin, and cool was hardly an invention of my generation. The three came together in the 1940s, when smack-using bebop players (think Charlie Parker) taught the "Beat Generation" that heroin was hip. Neither was my generation the last to succumb to a heroin fad. The triad of music, heroin, and cool united again in the 1990s, when drug-addled pop-culture icons such as Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), and Calvin Klein (of "heroin chic" fame) taught "Generation X" the same lesson. History, or at least the history of heroin, repeats itself. For white, middle-class folks like me heroin chic was an episode, a rebellious moment in an otherwise "normal" American life. But as Schneider makes clear, the passage of heroin from cultural elites to the population at large was not always so benign, particularly in the declining inner-cities of the 1960s and 1970s. Here heroin had nothing to do with being cool and everything to do with earning a living and escaping reality. For millions of impoverished, hopeless, urban-dwelling hispanics and blacks, heroin was a paycheck and a checkout. The drug helped destroy the people in the inner-city, and thus the inner-city itself. In response to the "heroin epidemic" of the 1960s and 1970s, the government launched the first war on drugs, focusing its energy on "pushers." But there were no "pushers" because–and this is the greatest insight in a book full of great insights–pushing was not the way heroin use spread, either among middle-class college kids or the down-and-out of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. No one pushed heroin on anyone. Rather, users taught their friends how to use; in turn, those friends–now users–taught their friends, and so on. Heroin stealthily spread through personal networks. The only part of the process that was visible was the result: in the case of suburban college kids, bad grades and rehab; in the case of poor urban hispanics and blacks, crime and incarceration. Not surprisingly, when the heroin "epidemic" ended, it was not due to the war on drugs. Heroin simply fell out of fashion, in this case being replaced by another fashionable drug, powder and crack cocaine. Today we are fighting cocaine just as we fought heroin, and, by all appearances, with similar success.

View on AmazonThis week we have Geoff Dean on the show to talk about his new book Organised Crime: Policing Illegal Business Entrepreneurialism (Oxford University Press, 2010). This is a practical book about organized crime. Geoff and his co-authors, Ivar Fahsing and Petter Gottschalk, approach organized crime from a business perspective and try to provide a means of investigating this type of crime from a market point of view. They see an organized crime enterprise like any other business enterprise, and say that it must go through the same stages or growth that are experienced by a legal commercial business. The authors are experienced researchers in the methodologies of policing and want to recognize the entrepreneurial basis of criminal enterprises, and investigative methods that pay heed to these characteristics of large criminal organizations. This is not a book about any one criminal group. Many examples and case studies are provided but they intend the book to have universal appeal. One of the books advantages is Geoff's ability to communicate visually. He is the master of the chart and diagram. As you will hear in the interview, the book is filled with visual explanations of the ideas and concepts it addresses. While Organised Crime was not written as a textbook, I have used it in class and found that it provides a good explanation of organized crime (for advanced students) as well as a great mechanism of strategic analysis which we use as an assessment tool.