How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

They have meaning today in reference to the organizational and intellectual structures of that kind of state, especially its legal and strategic communities. The early twenty-first century is another period of transition—but not toward the dissolution of the state itself and its replacement by nonstate actors, a false and ahistorical dichotomy drawn by short-sighted pundits. Instead, in keeping with a long-standing pattern, today’s familiar nation-state is evolving to become a range of other types of states. For good or ill, we are witnessing the natural evolution of the nineteenth-century European-style nation-state toward new, more flexible structures better suited to the challenges of the global, information-based context of the twenty-first century, with virtual communities overshadowing parliaments, international corporations displacing government bureaucracies, and private contractors supplanting national armies.

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