Playing Politics with Terrorism: A User's Guide

While governments are obliged to protect society and bring terrorists to justice, their effectiveness in tackling terrorism without undermining the support of the population for law and order or jeopardising basic liberties is paramount. In dealing with extremism, governments have found it difficult to balance the imperatives of security and the rights of liberty. That said, neither lethargy nor hysteria is conducive to ensuring national security. Rather, steely determination grounded in facts and sound judgments about the challenges confronting us are required. The exaggeration by governments of a terrorist threat in order to sustain a credible anti-terrorism narrative, to manipulate public opinion, to push through draconian legislation or even to win elections are not novelties of the post-9/11 world, but as the contributors to this book point out, governments in many countries, from Putin's Russia and Fujimori's Peru to Italy in the 1970s, have stumbled towards repressing the very liberty and democratic culture which the terrorists seek to destroy.