Values and Violence

Most books on terrorism deal with descriptions of terrorist organizations and activities, some examine privacy and civil liberties issues, and others treat terrorism as a series of policy choices. Hardly any books deal with the foundational questions of values and violence as they relate to terrorism. The two unique features of this book are that it deals with violence at the normative foundations of values and human dignity and that it includes many of the best-known authors in the world from a variety of disciplines, making it a paradigmatic example of cutting-edge study in interdisciplinary scholarship, with a focus on bringing theories and policy issues closer together.

"Values and Violence" includes chapters by a dozen of the leading scholars in the world on patterns of political violence, responses to terrorism, and the basic value choices inherent in them.

In this volume an unusual array of elite scholars addresses the role of values in understanding terrorism and forming policies for responses to it. Their essays, which appear here for the first time, have significance in the fears and concerns of the moment but the enduring values they espouse extend far beyond terrorism.

Contributors include Akeel Bilgrami, M. Cherif Bassiouni, Martha Crenshaw, Tom Farer, Marilyn Friedman, Amos Guiora, Bruce Hoffman, Martha Nussbaum, Frank Salter, and Amartya Sen.

"This is a remarkable collection of many of the best minds pondering the terrorist threat. . . . The international community needs to do much better than we have been doing; here is the intellectual platform for doing so."
Michael W. Doyle
Harold Brown Professor of International Affairs,
Law and Political Science, Columbia University

"Seven years after 9/11, policymakers are still struggling to understand the dynamics that produce terrorism in ways that help them craft better approaches for confronting the challenge of political violence. In Values and Violence, some of America‘s and the world’s top scholars come together to provide a state-of-the-art assessment of these issues.  I know of no other single volume that brings together this much talent to try to help the world understand the sources of the scourge of terrorism and, thereby, to help us understand how to contain it."
Philip Gordon
Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution,
Washington D.C.

"If you want a broad and sophisticated inter-disciplinary approach to terrorism to understand the role of values both in forming terrorist activity and in responding to its challenges, this reader is for you."
Shahram Chubin
Director of Studies, Geneva Centre for Security Policy