Terrorism and violent extremism

Abstract

Terrorism and violent extremism profoundly challenge global security (Gupta, 2016). More than 62,000 known terrorist incidents occurred worldwide between January 2011 and October 2015. Although the overall number of incidents worldwide declined from 2014 (17,000) to 2015 (15,000), even that trend did not hold for Western Europe and North America, both of which saw an increase (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 2016). Given that the tactic of terrorism has been around since ancient times, it is not a threat that is likely to diminish in the foreseeable future (Chaliand, 2016; Laqueur, 2016).