Terrorism in the Cold War: State Support in the West, Middle East and Latin America

Accounts of the relationships between states and terrorist organizations in the Cold War era have long been shaped by speculation, a lack of primary sources and even conspiracy theories. In the last few years, however, things have evolved rapidly. Using a wide range of case studies including the British State and Loyalist Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, as well as the United States and Nicaragua, this book sheds new light on the relations between state and terrorist actors, allowing for a fresh and much more insightful assessment of the contacts, dealings, agreements and collusion with terrorist organizations undertaken by state actors on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

This book presents the current state of research and provides an assessment of the nature, motives, effects, and major historical shifts of the relations between individual states and terrorist organizations. The articles collected demonstrate that these state-terrorism relationships were not only much more ambiguous than much of the older literature had suggested but are, in fact, crucial for the understanding of global political history in the Cold War era.

Adrian Hänni is Lecturer for Political History at Distance Learning University, Switzerland. He was previously postdoctoral fellow at University of Leiden and Lecturer in History at University of Zurich. He holds a PhD from University of Zurich.
Thomas Riegler is an Affiliate Researcher at the Austrian Centre for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies at the University of Graz. He is a member of the Editorial Board for the academic journal Perspectives on Terrorism.
Przemyslaw Gasztold is a research fellow at the Historic Research Office of the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw. He received his Ph.D. from Warsaw University in 2016.