This post by Danielle Cave made me realise similarities between an emerging online community in Australia and a development in the United States in the mid- to late-2000s.

When America had tens of thousands of troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, in wars that were clearly not going well, an online community developed that intensively discussed military strategy. This took place within what was then called the blogosphere, which was relatively new, and included junior officers as well as civilians with a strong intellectual interest in strategy. In this community the discussions were not primarily about whether the initial decisions to invade were good or bad. Instead their key focus was on limiting the damage, and particularly on the merits or weaknesses of “population-centric counterinsurgency”.

This occurred in grassroots (personal or group) blogs such as Abu Muqawama, Gunpowder and Lead, Fear, Honour and Interest, Inkspots, Slouching Towards Columbia, Rethinking Security, Registan, Zenpundit, Attackerman, Ghosts of Alexander, and the influential hub that was Small Wars Journal.  That’s only the sites I was familiar with at the time, this post by Tanner Greer lists many others.

This happened in the context of a “future of war” debate within the US military establishment, the media, and academia. In the most simplified version, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl (Ret) argued for population-centric counterinsurgency which Colonial Gian Gentile opposed. Each side had passionate supporters, and the debate spread through military journals such as Joint Forces Quarterly, the media, and the Internet. General David Petraeus’s appointment to command in Iraq, and the massive reduction in both Iraqi and American deaths following the “surge”, seemingly vindicated the population-centric counterinsurgency approach, but then the worsening situation in Afghanistan (and Iraq’s later unravelling) seemingly discredited it.

The online strategy-sphere was part of this dynamic. The Internet allowed those who weren’t writing books, giving interviews to the media, or holding influential military or political positions, to join and influence the debate. Junior officers serving in the field, and civilians who obsessively read strategic literature and closely followed events, now had a space. This 2009 compilation on the impact of “new media” on the military gives a good sense of how new this all was. There was also a lot of overlap between the insider and outsider participants; David Kilcullen wrote in Small Wars Journal while working for the Pentagon.

By the early 2010s this online strategy-sphere slowly dissipated, or at least changed. Many of the group and personal blogs became inactive, for several reasons, some discussed in Tanner Greer’s post and others Storified by Kelsey Atherton. The scene evolved and centred on new outlets like War on the Rocks, whose writers included some of the bloggers from the strategy-sphere’s early years.

However, at the time the American online strategy-sphere was at its height, there was very little like that occurring in Australia.

There’s no reason an American online development should automatically be mirrored in Australia, but it’s strange that there was barely any equivalent at all. Australia was involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and these wars were followed by our media and featured repeatedly in domestic political debate, but there was no sizeable strategy-focused blogging community, certainly not involving junior officers.

This partly reflects something that Sam Roggeveen has pointed out, that Australia has largely lacked grassroots blogs focused on international policy issues. He notes some exceptions, such as this blog, as well as “Leah Farrell’s All  Things  Counter-Terrorism, the defence-focused group blog Pnyx, Andrew Carr’s Chasing the Norm and Security Scholar by Natalie Sambhi and Nic Jenzen-Jones.” There have been some others, but otherwise international policy blogging in Australia has centred on institutional blogs, such as the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, ASPI’s Strategist, and ANU’s New Mandala, East Asia Forum, and South Asia Masala, and Curtin University’s Strategic Flashlight. The majority of these blogs (whether grass-roots or institutional) did not focus on military strategy, did not exist at the height of the US online strategy-sphere (mid- to late-2000s), and rarely involved serving members of the military.

One reason for this could be that Australia’s military did not have a “future of war” debate like the US did. Albert Palazzo has argued that cultural, bureaucratic, and operational impediments prevented members of the Australian military from openly engaging is such debate. Other reasons could include those outlined in Roggeveen’s essay, even though they are intended to apply to international policy blogging rather just the subset focused on military strategy. These reasons include Australia’s smaller role in the world, the more closed nature of our defence and foreign policy establishments, and that Australia never had a political blogosphere as large or influential as America experienced.

However, this has recently been changing. In the past couple of years, an online strategy-sphere has started to develop in Australia. For example:

• The Australian Army has started its own blog, the Land Power Forum, with contributions from many active members. As Danielle Cave points out, despite it being a government blog the posts are not simply puff pieces. There are of course firm boundaries set though, with the about page stating “Land Power Forum is not designed to re-litigate issues that have already been discussed and decided upon.”
• Army Major Clare O’Neill has a website called “Grounded Curiousity”, including a blog and a podcast, which “aims to start a conversation with junior commanders about our future in warfare.”
• Army Major Mick Cook has started a podcast called The Dead Prussian (referring to Calusewitz), which “aims to explore War and Warfare through discussion and analysis of military theory, historical events, contemporary conflicts, and expert interviews.”
• Army Brigadier Mick Ryan has a Twitter account, has been writing in The Bridge (an online journal which is part of the Military Writer’s Guild) about the importance of social media for the military, and appeared on Clare O’Neill’s podcast.
• Several Army officers recently spoke at a conference on Social Media and the Spectrum of Modern Conflict. You can watch videos of their talks here.
• Navy Captain Justin Jones, who was director of the Sea Power Centre, has been blogging on the Lowy Interpreter and tweeting for a while (I would guess that there are other examples from the Navy, and maybe the Air Force, but most of what I have found is Army).
• With the creation of ASPI’s Strategist in 2012, and the Land Power Forum in 2014, Australia’s institutional blogs now feature much more discussion of military strategy than before (though strategy has always been part of the discussion on the Lowy Interpreter since 2007), with both civilian and military contributions.

This all shows that Australia has started to develop its own online strategy-sphere.

It has not been centred on personal and group blogs, making it quite different to the US experience, which reflects shifts in the online landscape in both countries. As media outlets and think-tanks adopted blogging-style publishing approaches, grassroots blogs are no longer as new or influential as they once were, so the term blogosphere doesn’t really make sense any more. Grassroots blogs have been superseded by institutional blogs, social media and podcasts. Unsurprisingly, Australia’s newly developing strategy-sphere reflects this, and some of the people employed by Australia’s institutional blogs had begun as individual bloggers.

Why this has begun to develop is unclear. One likely reason is that one arm of the Australian Defence Force, the Army, appears to have become more open to it. Another reason could be an increased public appetite for military discussions that involve a degree of inside knowledge and don’t neatly fit left-right divides. For example, former Army officer James Brown regularly writes for the The Saturday Paper and published a well-received book, Anzac’s Long Shadow. David Kilcullen’s Quarterly Essay Blood Year proved extremely popular and won a Walkley Award.

Whatever the reasons, an Australian online strategy-sphere has started to develop, and I hope it continues to.

The new Defence White Paper describes Australia as entering a more unpredictable and potentially more dangerous world. It frequently mentions terrorism, almost twice as much as earlier White Papers do, as a worrying element in Australia’s strategic outlook:

Events during the three years since the release of the last Defence White Paper in 2013 demonstrate how rapidly Australia’s security environment can change. The relationship between the United States and China continues to evolve and will be fundamental to our future strategic circumstances. Territorial disputes between claimants in the East China and South China Seas have created uncertainty and tension in our region. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea continues to be a source of instability. State fragility has helped enable the rise of Daesh (also known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) terrorists in the Middle East, incidents across the world have demonstrated the pervasive nature of the threat of terrorism, and a violation of international law led to the deaths of Australians in the skies over Ukraine.

Yet Defence often isn’t perceived as having much of counter-terrorism role. For example, Allan Behm’s Strategist post on the White Paper said that:

Similarly, terrorism isn’t ultimately a defence matter. It’s evidently a law enforcement and intelligence issue, and some elements of the ADF capability (particularly the precision assault skills of the SAS) are applicable in certain situations.

This is true domestically, but internationally it underplays Defence’s role, which has gone beyond certain situations to become almost routine. The Australian Defence Force has often fought, or assisted others to fight, groups like al-Qaeda and IS. The ADF engaged in combat against al-Qaeda during the initial invasion of Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda elements were among the insurgent groups Australia fought in Afghanistan in subsequent years. Recently, the RAAF has carried out air strikes against IS in both Iraq and Syria. While IS should not be seen as purely a terrorist problem, and nor should the insurgency in Afghanistan, this does demonstrate the ADF’s extensive use in operations against proscribed terrorist organisations.

It’s not just direct operations, as the ADF has more commonly played a counter-terrorism role through what’s called ‘building partner capacity’. Much of their role in Afghanistan involved training local forces. Australia has also helped train units of regional militaries, such as in Indonesia and the Philippines, as part of this capacity building effort. The ADF has reportedly assisted the Philippines military with operations against the Abu Sayyaf Group in Mindanao.

This is similar to the Australian Federal Police’s Fighting Terrorism at its Source initiative launched in 2004 following terrorist attacks in Indonesia, such as the Bali (2002), Jakarta (2003) and Australian Embassy (2004) bombings, which helped improve police counter-terrorism skills in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. The ADF’s effort to build partner capacity in several countries across the world has been the Defence equivalent of the AFP’s regional initiative.

Australia’s current role in Iraq is an extension of this effort, and shows how significant Defence’s role is. In early 2015 the government approved “the Building Partner Capacity (BPC) mission comprised of approximately 300 Australian Army personnel which will operate in partnership with 110 New Zealand Defence Force personnel.” Much of this effort has involved training the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service (CTS), which has become one of the most militarily and politically important entities in the country.

Militarily, they are important because they have remained standing while many other units have collapsed, with the result that they are taking on tasks much more ambitious than the activities (such as launching raids and gathering intelligence) they were created for. Counter-terrorism services aren’t usually thought of as firing artillery and seizing cities, but that has become required of the CTS. This Vice video follows members of the CTS during the retaking of Ramadi late last year, a city whose fall to IS in May 2015 represented a major setback .

Politically, the CTS is important because they operate outside of Iraq’s Ministry of Defence and Ministry of the Interior, and have proved controversial within Iraq’s political system. They have operated only under executive authority ever since they were created by the United States after its invasion of Iraq, raising fears they could become the Prime Minister’s personal army. This has not happened – when Nouri al-Maliki was doing everything he could to avoid being deposed as Prime Minister in 2014, the CTS did not come to his aid – but the fears remain. Another reason for the CTS’s political importance is that it acts as a counterweight to the Iranian-backed Shia sectarian militias that work closely with other units of the Iraqi military, which is why the CTS is favoured by Western military forces.

Australia’s Special Operations Task Group, deployed as part of Operation OKRA, has been assisting the CTS. During the Ramadi operation, Australian troops helped direct air strikes and provided remote support to at least one unit within CTS, the 1st Iraqi Special Operations Force Brigade. Australia’s role has been described as vital, but we don’t get to know much about it. The secrecy that covers Australia’s military operations (often excessive secrecy when compared to other Western democracies, which resulted in Australians rarely being able to see their own war in Afghanistan) prevents this.

Important questions are unlikely to be answered. For example, was the recent scaling down of 2nd Commando Regiment’s commitment (which provided the bulk of Australia’s assistance to CTS) a good or bad decision? How effective is Australia’s assistance in the fight against IS, can it be improved, and what would help improve it? How does Australia tackle the human rights problems involved in working with Iraq’s military? With videos and images appearing of CTS units engaging in war crimes, is it still true, as the Defence Department stated early last year, that “no instances of alleged human rights violations have been reported [internally through the ADF] since the Special Operations Task Group started co-operating with the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service”? What impact does Australia’s assistance have on the internal political fighting within Iraq’s security establishment? Does it help counter Iranian influence, and what are the risks involved in that?

These types of questions matter, because we can anticipate that Defence will continue to have a significant counter-terrorism role. The threat isn’t going away. As David Kilcullen rightly pointed out in The Australian:

As I write, Western countries (several, particularly the US, now with severely reduced international credibility) face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region, with a far higher level of geopolitical competi­tion, and a much more severe risk of great-power conflict, than at any time since 9/11.

It isn’t just Islamic State; al-Qa’ida has emerged from its eclipse and is back in the game in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria, Somalia and Yemen. We’re dealing with not one but two global terrorist organisations, each with regional branches, plus a vastly larger radicalised population at home, and a flow of foreign terrorist fighters 10 to 12 times the size of anything seen before. Likewise, last year’s Taliban resurgence shows that as bad as things seem now, they can get much worse if the Afghan drawdown creates the same opportunity for Islamic State next year as the Iraqi drawdown did in 2012.

This will likely mean more military action by Western countries, with Australia participating. The White Paper goes into a few specifics on this: continued participation in international coalitions and building partner capacity efforts, new equipment such as armed unmanned aircraft, as well as light helicopters for special forces. But it’s hard to be optimistic about this reducing the overall threat. Military action has been able to weaken particular groups, and overthrow governments, without undermining the broader global jihadist movement. As Kilcullen points out in the same article, Western wars over the past decade and a half don’t have a good track record:

The first step is to admit that this really is, every bit, the strategic failure it seems to be. For the hard truth is that the events of 2014-2016, including the “Blood Year” that started with the fall of Mosul, represent nothing less than the collapse of Western counterterrorism strategy as we’ve known it since 2001.

After 14 years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, we’re worse off today than before 9/11, with a stronger, more motivated, more dangerous enemy than ever.

Despite this, it’s good that the new Defence White Paper includes this focus on terrorism. Greater recognition of Defence’s role in counter-terrorism should mean it can be more appreciated, but also more scrutinised.

I’ve recently been making notes on the fields of terrorism studies, civil war studies, and social movement studies, looking at assessments from both people within these fields and people outside of them. When looking at the internal assessments of terrorism studies, two things stood out.

• The assessments are usually very negative about the field’s methodological rigour
• They’ve become much more positive in the past five to ten years

I had already been aware of the first point. Terrorism studies has regularly been accused, by its own leading scholars, of poor research quality. As Lisa Stampnitzky has written:

It may not seem surprising that the production of knowledge about such a contentious subject would attract external critiques. What is more deeply puzzling, however, is that some of the harshest and most frequent laments have come from the practitioners of terrorism studies themselves. Terrorism researchers have characterized their field as stagnant, poorly conceptualized, lacking in rigor, and devoid of adequate theory, data, and methods.

However, I hadn’t been aware earlier of the second point, the trend towards a more positive outlook. So this post is to show how internal assessments of terrorism studies have gradually become more optimistic.

Examples of the earlier, strongly negative, assessments are easy to find. Alex P. Schmid and A. J. Jongman famously wrote in 1988 that:

There are probably few areas in the social science literature in which so much is written on the basis of so little research. Perhaps as much as 80 percent of the literature is not research-based in any rigorous sense…

Over fifteen years later, Andrew Silke reviewed the output of two core terrorism journals (Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism) between 1995 and 1999, and concluded that:

Ultimately, terrorism research is not in a healthy state. It exists on a diet of fast food research: quick, cheap, ready-to-hand and nutritionally dubious…. A limited range of methodologies in data gathering, combined with a reluctance to use more rigourous analysis, has left the field with serious deficiencies in many respects. Ultimately the methods used by terrorism researchers are essentially exploratory.

In 2005 John Horgan published a book on the psychology of terrorism, extensively reviewing the literature at the time. He later reflected:

I concluded on a depressing note. The psychology of terrorism, I argued, was at best under-developed, and at worst doomed to the mercy of unrealistic expectations of those who seek quick and simple solutions to the terrorism problem. Asking counterterrorism practitioners to consider contributions from the academic literature on terrorism was, at best, a half-hearted recommendation. Yes, there was a lot of quality research out there, but the unending torrent of drivel made it ever more impossible to keep oneself afloat.

But recently there has been a shift. Within the past five to ten years, the internal assessments have become more optimistic. The same scholars who issued such damning critiques have found considerable improvement.

For example, Alex P. Schmid’s most recent review of the literature argued that:

Looking back over four decades of terrorism research, one cannot fail to see that, next to much pretentious nonsense, a fairly solid body of consolidated knowledge has emerged. In fact, Terrorism Studies has never been in better shape than now…. Terrorism Studies — despite many shortcomings — has matured.

Silke’s most recent review, covering two core journals from 1990 to 2007, also found reasons for optimism. He argued that:

There are signs that research published in recent years is less opinion-based and more rigorous in methodology and analysis…. The use of inferential statistics on terrorism data in particular has nearly quadrupled since 9/11, a trend which can only help improve the reliability and validity of the conclusions being reached by researchers.

He more recently suggested, along with co-author Jennifer Schmidt-Petersen, that terrorism studies was experiencing its golden age:

Indeed, far from being stagnant or moribund, terrorism studies is arguably enjoying a golden age. High impact articles are appearing at a rate never before seen, and the core knowledge of the area is shifting and coalescing around new research and theories.

John Horgan’s 2014 update of his 2005 study also noted the field’s improvement:

So what has changed? In the intervening 8 years, there is much to commend. For a start, the field is no longer dominated by the small handful of researchers who traditionally characterized what is now commonly known as ‘terrorism studies’ (just don’t call it a discipline). Fortunately, the increase in interest from the social and behavioral sciences has also mirrored an increase in solid, quality research output. In fact the creep of systematic, interdisciplinary research on terrorist behavior has meant that it is certainly getting easier to distinguish opinion from analysis, and snake-oil conjecture from analysis that is informed by empirical evidence.

Similarly, Peter Neumann and Scott Kleinmann recently examined the rigour of ‘radicalisation research’, which can be considered a subset of terrorism research. Their findings were also positive:

Overall, the results are not as damning as one might have expected based on Silke’s and Schmid and Jongman’s earlier surveys of the terrorism studies literature. It would not be justified, therefore, to say, as Schmid and Jongman did in 1983, that the entire field is “impressionistic, anecdotal, [and] superficial.” On the contrary, there is much to be encouraged by, not least the fact that more than half of the items in our sample scored “high” in relation to either empirical or methodological rigor, and more than a quarter (27 percent) did so in both.

They also raise issues with Silke’s critique, arguing that it uses too narrow a definition to determine rigour:

For example, Silke classifies nearly all document-based research as “secondary source,” which effectively dismisses entire academic disciplines and methods—especially historical research—as methodologically and empirically inadequate.

They also question Silke’s emphasis on the use of statistics:

Indeed, for “micro phenomena” such as terrorism and radicalization, the use of qualitative methodologies—such as detailed case studies and narratives—may, in many cases, be more appropriate and produce more valid results than the construction of large—and largely meaningless—datasets. This, of course, is no excuse for laziness and sloppy research, which—disturbingly—could be found in many historical studies in our sample. But it suggests that it would be misleading to believe that quantitative research with large datasets, which—from a strictly methodological point of view—may be cleaner and more rigorous, is necessarily also the kind of research that will produce the most relevant insights about the phenomenon that radicalization research seeks to understand. Given the “micro” nature of the subject, the lower share of studies that draw on large amounts of empirical evidence—and, consequently, the less extensive use of quantitative methods, inferential statistics, etc.—must not necessarily be a cause of concern.

So on the whole, internal assessments of terrorism studies to be more optimistic about the field today than ten or more years ago, and find huge improvement.

This view isn’t universal. Marc Sageman recently argued that the field had stagnated, prompting responses from Max Taylor, Alex P. Schmid, David H. Schanzer, Clark McCauley, Sophia Moskalenko, and Jessica Stern followed a rejoinder from Sageman. And all the assessments mentioned in this post still note extensive problems with the field. Peter Neumann and Scott Kleinmann’s assessment ended by noting that:

Yet, despite clusters of excellence, there remains a significant amount of research that fails to meet minimum standards of scholarly work. In most disciplines, having 34 percent of published research that is either methodologically or empirically poor would be considered unacceptable, yet in terrorism studies—and radicalization research more specifically—this state of affairs has been allowed to persist.

This all leaves the question of why, despite improvement, there is plenty of sub-par research. There’s a lot of writing on this,  I recommend three articles in particular.

The first is an external assessment, from the earlier-mentioned Lisa Stampnitzky, who is a sociologist who the studied the field itself. In this article she describes how terrorism studies, rather than functioning as a purely academic field, awkwardly straddles academia, the media and the state. The second is Magnus Ranstorp’s introduction to the book Mapping Terrorism Research, which provides a good outline of the field and some of its problems. The final one is Thomas Hegghammer’s conference paper on the future of terrorism studies, which gives good advice on how current researchers can help progress the field.

I didn’t do my usual end–of–year post in December, so this is a short post to reflect a bit and look ahead.

This blog ended 2014 on a pessimistic note, and that hasn’t changed much. I was more optimistic about the terrorism threat when I began blogging in 2012. Recent years haven’t given strong reasons for hope, certainly not 2015. The year began and ended with major attacks in France which undermined expectations that the jihadist threat in the West had become reduced to amateurish plots by “lone wolves” or very small ad-hoc cells.

The attacks were also a reminder of the well-known risk that returned foreign fighters can pose. Eight of the nine terrorists who perpetrated the November Paris attacks are suspected to have trained in Syria with the “Islamic State” (IS). Tens of thousands of  foreign fighters have joined IS and other Sunni jihadist groups in the region, and even though most won’t later prove a theat to their home countries, a small portion already has. For well over a year, the group’s violence has not been confined to Iraq and Syria. It had engaged in violence in countries such Libya, Lebanon, and Egypt, and been targeting Western countries for some time.

Of course, IS isn’t the only threat. Al-Qaeda hasn’t disappeared, and its Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra remains strong. Shia jihadism is also a concern, as thousands of Shia foreign fighters have also joined the Syrian civil war (on the Assad regime’s side), and Hezbollah has perpetrated terror plots across the world. Then there is the often-downplayed threat of extreme-right terrorism, which has seen major attacks in Europe and the United States. Various separatist and extreme-left groups have also engaged in terrorism in the West, though fortunately they have rarely proven deadly in recent years and were much more of a problem in the 1970s and 1980s. And this is still only a narrow look, as most terrorism overwhelmingly occurs outside of Western countries, and there is also the terror inflicted by states.

For Australia, the main terrorist threat this century (with some exceptions) has been from extremists inspired by al-Qaeda and more recently IS. Security agencies state that they have foiled six terror plots since September 2014, which would be:

• The alleged plot to murder a random member of the public in Sydney (possibly by beheading), which led to the Operation Appleby raids in September 2014.
• The alleged plot involving firearms and knives in Brisbane, which led to the Operation Bolton raids in Brisbane on October 2014.
• The alleged plot to attack a government building in Sydney, which led to further Operation Appleby raids in December 2014 and December 2015.
• The alleged plot to carry out a beheading in Sydney, which led to the Operation Castrum raids in February 2015.
• The alleged plot to murder police at an Anzac Day service in Melbourne, which led to the Operation Rising raids in April 2015. A 14-year old UK boy has pleaded guilty, while the Australian alleged co-conspirator faces trial.
• The apparent plot involving improvised explosives in Melbourne, which led to the Operation Amberd raid in May 2015. A 17-year old boy has pleaded guilty but not yet been sentenced.

Then there have been the acts of violence. The stabbing of counter-terrorism police officers in Melbourne in September 2014, the hostage-taking and murder at the Lindt Café in Sydney in December 2014, and the murder of NSW Police accountant Curtis Cheng in Sydney in October 2014.

Some of the trials should begin this year, allowing us to see more details of the alleged activities and whether the evidence proves as strong as the prosecution hopes. The coronial inquest for the Sydney Siege will continue, and there will also be the Numan Haider inquest. So there should be a lot of information coming out this year, and probably several new arrests too.

As for myself, I plan to do some more writing on the terrorism threat, and also on problems with Australia’s response, in both its coercive and non-coercive manifestations.

However, I won’t be spending the next year focusing only on terrorism or on Australia. I’m currently doing a PhD at Melbourne University, looking at transnational support for armed movements. The PhD doesn’t fit purely into the field of terrorism studies, it also straddles the fields of civil war studies and social movement studies. I’m also planning to engage more with the broader parent disciplines of political science and international relations.

I’m currently finding the PhD to be a struggle, though PhDs are of course meant to be a struggle. I’m nearly a year in now, having started in March, and need to focus on it more. So I expect that this year I will be publishing less, but am looking forward to researching more and learning many new skills.

I’m still working at Australian Policy Online at Swinburne University. I’m also working on a small project (a literature review) at Victoria University, funded by the Victorian Social Cohesion and Community Resilience Ministerial Taskforce, which should finish by the end of January.

I had said I would write a piece on engagement between academia and government in national security matters. This has ended up getting out of control, because I’m finding the topic so much more exciting than I expected. I was planning for it to be a small blog post, but now my notes alone make up over 9000 words. It’s looking at the history of both terrorism studies and strategic studies, in the US, Australia and elsewhere. So it has become a much bigger task, and I don’t know when I will finish it.

Finally, I want to give some shout-outs to a few people whose work you should follow. Some of them are friends of mine, some are people I only know online, and all are valuable new voices who should be better known.

Matteo Vergani from Monash has a social science blog. Alex Phelan from Monash has a blog on conflict in Latin America called “More Than Wars” (she’s one of the few scholars in Australia to examine political violence in Latin America, the only other one I can think of is Cesar Alvarez Velasquez). Jaye Weatherburn from Australian Policy Online has a blog on data management, digital libraries and public policy called “kaizen”.

My external PhD supervisor, Debra Smith, now has a Vic Uni profile page. Fatima Measham, an excellent writer who has often helped me with my own writing, has a blog called “This Is Complicated” and a column at Eureka Street. Natalie Sambhi, one of the key people to encourage me to start blogging, has a blog called “Security Scholar” and often hosts the podcasts Sea Control and Foreign Entanglements.

Leanne O’Donnell, who used to work for iiNet and now writes on data retention, privacy, and other issues, has a website called “Ms.Lods”. David Wells, who has worked for UK and Australian intelligence services, has a blog called “Counter-Terrorism Matters“. Australian Army Major Clare O’Niell has a website called “Grounded Curiousity”, and a great podcast. Some other Army officers producing interesting work are Jason Logue and Andrew Maher.

Over in America, Adam Elkus is a fascinating and ridiculously prolific writer, from whom I always learn about loads of research I wasn’t aware of. For examples of his breadth, see this and this. Jennifer Williams, formerly from Brookings and now at Vox, writes great pieces on terrorism and other topics. Also check out the Jihadology Podcast created by Aaron Zelin. And I cannot recommend the Loopcast highly enough. Run by Sina Kashefipour and Chelsea Daymon, it’s easily my favourite national security podcast.

There’s many more who deserve to be added, but that’s enough for now. I hope you get a lot out of them.

It’s time for me to start working again for year, and blogging will likely continue to be sparse. Thanks very much to everyone who has been reading, and hope you have a great a year as possible.

I’m re-reading a lot of Fred Halliday’s work (Middle East scholar at LSE until his death in 2010), mainly his collection of openDemocracy essays. One part in this 2007 essay really struck me, when he outlined some long-term consequences from the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

It has already set in train six major processes, which will take years to work themselves through:

1. the wholesale discrediting of the US, its allies, particularly Britain, and any campaign for the promotion of democracy in the Arab world
2. the unleashing across the middle east, and more broadly within the Muslim world, of a revitalised militant Islamism, inspired if not organised by al-Qaida, which has used the Iraq war greatly to strengthen and internationalise its appeal
3. the shattering of the power and authority of the Iraqi state, built by the British and later hardened by the Ba’athists and the fragmentation of Iraq into separate, antagonistic, ethnic and religious zones
4. the explosion, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shi’a in Iraq, a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition
5. the alienation of all sectors of Turkish politics from the west and the stimulation of an authoritarian nationalism there of a kind not seen since the 1920s
6. the fomenting, albeit in slow motion and with some constraints, of a new regional rivalry, between two groupings: Iran and its allies (including Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas), versus Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan – a rivalry made all the more ominous and contagious by Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Sadly, this stands up well today.

Amid all the post-Paris punditry, there’s been some excellent articles lamenting the state of political discussion on the “Islamic State” (IS) threat. Richard Cooke showed how familiar political narratives can’t easily explain this obscene violence. Osman Faruqi wrote this mainly Australia-focused piece, “Everyone’s wrong and no one knows what to do (including me)“, despairing at poorly founded solutions proposed ultra-confidently by commentators from both left and right. Similarly, Adam Elkus wrote this mainly America-focused piece on the superficial strategies proposed by both hawks and doves.

I share the despair expressed in these pieces, and propose no solution myself. Identifying bad ideas, such as shutting out refugees, is much harder than coming up with good ones.

However social science can, and should, help the wider societal effort to figure out what to do. Within academia, engagement with national security issues often remains controversial (with reason), and is relatively rare in Australia compared to the United States. But I’m firmly of the view that it’s both extremely valuable and that there’s a strong ethical imperative for it:

Social science has an implied social contract with society: In exchange for the privileges and freedoms of academic life, social science agrees to help solve problems that concern society.

And IS is, to put it mildly, a problem that concerns society. So this post provides some resources introducing what social science has to say about the IS threat.

It builds on the previous post, but with a more academic focus. The resources are all open-access.

The first place to start is these Monkey Cage posts on what social science can tell us about the Paris attacks, and what social science can tell us about IS.

These edited collections from the past two years help explain the background of IS and the broader Syrian conflict. They are particularly valuable for demystifying IS, comparing it to other insurgencies rather than treating it as something unprecedented:

The political science of Syria’s war, Project on Middle East Political Science, 19 December 2013.

Syria and the Islamic State, Project on Middle East Political Science, 1 October 2014.

Special issue on the Islamic State, Perspectives on Terrorism, August 2015.

These are some good short pieces on the “is IS Islamic?” debate:

How ISIS uses and abuses Islam, Vox, 18 November 2015.

Does ISIS really have nothing to do with Islam? Islamic apologetics carry serious risks, Washington Post, 18 November 2015.

The endless recurrence of the clash of civilizations, Monkey Cage, 20 November 2015.

ISIS, the clash of civilizations and the problem of apologetics, Medium @Aelkus, 20 November 2015.

Why it does not matter whether ISIS is Islamic, Medium @Aelkus, 20 November 2015.

These reports outline research on Countering Violent Extremism (non-coercive efforts to prevent people from becoming involved in terrorism), which is one part of the response to IS:

Does CVE work? Lessons learned from the global effort to counter violent extremism, Global Center on Cooperative Security, September 2015.

Countering violent extremism: developing an evidence-base for policy and practice, Hedayah, September 2015.

The terrorist attacks in Paris have killed over a hundred people. It will probably be a while before it becomes clear who carried out these murders and how they evaded the security services. In the meantime, this post provides sources of background information to help make sense of the attacks.

On this style of urban siege terrorism:

John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, Urban siege in South Asia, Open Democracy, 9 November 2009.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Daniel Trombly, The tactical and strategic use of small arms by terrorists, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, October 2012.

David Kilcullen, Westgate mall attacks: urban areas are the battleground of the 21st century, The Guardian, 28 September 2013.

John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus, Urban siege in Paris: a spectrum of armed assault, Small Wars Journal, 2 February 2015.

On French counter-terrorism:

Charles Rault, The French approach to counterterrorism, Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel, 13 January 2010.

Pascale Combelles Siegel, French counterterrorism in the wake of Mohammed Merah’s attack, Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel, 23 April 2012.

Frank Foley, Charlie Hebdo attack: is France’s counter-terrorism model still the example to follow?, The Telegraph, 13 January 2015.

Joshua Keating, No one in Europe is tougher on terror than France. That didn’t stop the attacks, Slate, 13 January 2015.

On the ability of IS and al-Qaeda to launch attacks within Western countries:

Clint Watts, Inspired, networked and directed – the muddled jihad of ISIS & al Qaeda post Charlie Hebdo, War On The Rocks, 12 January 2015.

Thomas Hegghammer and Petter Nesser, Assessing the Islamic State’s commitment to attacking the West, Perspectives on Terrorism, August 2015.