Issues of Terrorism in the Post-Coronavirus Era

This monograph explores the multidimensional links between terrorism and cyber-terrorism, and terrorism in the Coronavirus pandemic era that emerged in 2020. Those multidimensional links amount to a set of conduit points or modalities between contemporary Coronavirus era conditions, characteristics, and effects, and the phenomenon of political terrorism, which is a continuously evolving method used to achieve political goals. It follows that work to illustrate those conduit points and how terrorism has evolved will provide insight into the basics of more effective counterterrorism policies.

The notion of enhanced terrorism involves terrorist group or lone operative exploitation of natural and human-made calamitous conditions to compound terrorist event effects. Those catastrophic conditions serve as antecedents to enhanced terrorism. Natural catastrophic conditions include, but are not limited to, geographical locales affected by flood, drought, malnutrition, and the disease that invariably follows. One contemporary example is Canada’s massive wildfires in 2023, with their cross-border effects and potential to influence further climate change.

Like many other regions, Africa has been a target of global terrorism in recent decades with countries like Nigeria, Somalia, Congo DRC, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Mozambique, Libya, Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Kenya being among the most affected. Specifically, Kenya is ranked 23 out of 135 on the 2020 Global Terrorism Index which measures the impact of terrorism on countries. The same index ranks Kenya twelfth in Africa in terms of terrorism impact after Nigeria, Somalia, Congo DRC, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Mozambique, Libya, Central African Republic, and South Sudan. In this chapter, I use data from the Rand Global Terrorism database and other sources to explore Kenya’s experience with global terrorism in the 1975–2018 period before briefly reflecting on the same in the COVID and post-COVID era. The chapter starts with an exploration of the factors behind Kenya’s vulnerability to global terrorism before moving on to explore the temporal and geographic distribution of terrorist incidents in the study period, their victims (i.e., number of people killed and wounded), property damage, weapons used, responsible terrorist groups, and the challenges of dealing with terrorism in the post-COVID era including the worrying rise of the terrorism-climate nexus. A good understanding of these issues can help Kenya to protect itself from future terrorism attacks.

We are living in changing times dictated by a pandemic of middle age dimensions, and yet the old world with its climate change, environmental degradation (due to climate change), organized crime and terrorism is still with us. There is an inherent connection between terrorism and organized crime though there is a cultural gap between them as the first is driven by ideology. The phenomenon of terrorism that exploits the opportunity of pandemics is undoubtedly in need of investigation and study. We are interested in widespread dissemination of knowledge to produce a global front against the pandemic, yet on the other hand, we are limited by fear that this knowledge will be exploited for terrorist purposes. We will look for a solution based on global efforts and not on the self-capabilities of competing nation-states, though this approach is far from achieving consensus considering what we see in Israel, in the U.S., and in other countries. Many claim that the Corona crisis is just a general return to the reality that awaits us because of the climate crisis. If we knew how to benefit from human knowledge and how to share it, this could be the opportunity for humanity to survive and even flourish in this new world that will grow on the ruins of the old world that will not survive climate change.

The technology of CRISPR has emerged as a transformative tool in genome editing, offering precision, efficiency, and accessibility across various sectors, including medicine and agriculture. While its benefits are profound, the potential for misuse poses serious biosecurity challenges. The intensive work done during the COVID-19 pandemic in past years exposed the capabilities of this evolving technology to potential terrorists and increased the capability to realize its objectives to many potential misusers. Thus, using this technique to create bio-weapons becomes a real potential threat. Gene editing, using CRISPR technology and its variants, creates serious concerns and a potential to develop a significant threat in the post-COVID-19 era. This chapter describes the CRISPR capabilities. It further examines how bio-hackers will be able to harness them in order to create a future bio-threat. The chapter highlights the relative ease with which terrorists will be able to engineer pathogens with enhanced harmful traits.

Terrorism and counter terrorism continued during the pandemic and on the surface neither appears to have been greatly affected by it.  The pandemic has been significant and had many obvious consequences, some affecting terrorism and that's what the chapter is about. The pandemic was the beginning of dozens of scenarios, we trace some in this paper.  Throughout the paper we use the inclusion of causality measure (CM), which is a way to express a judgement about the likelihood that the pandemic was a major direct cause of the scenario ranging from 10 (obvious connection) to 0 (no connection). The chapter thus focuses on changes expected in the terror threat in the post-corona era in which some are evolutionary, and some are by-product of the pandemic.

This chapter presents a methodology to analyze a new category in terrorism studies: threat convergence. It designates a significantly expanded, more operationally capable, and more lethal category of terrorist warfare which results from the convergence in certain terrorist groups of what are generally considered nine separate and distinct types of terrorist-related activities and violence. These nine types of terrorist activities, violence, and enabling conditions that converge consist of mass casualty terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, cyber activities, cyber warfare, criminality, enabling conditions in weak and failed states, vulnerable regions within strong states, partnerships with other like-minded terrorist groups, and state sponsors. It is important to analyze these converging of terrorist activities, violence, and enabling conditions because they provide government counter-terrorism services with valuable early warning indicators of emerging lethal threats that need to be addressed in a more comprehensive way.

Climate change-driven environmental changes and disasters will have secondary consequences on human systems, including inducing migration, straining public health, disrupting economies, challenging governmental institutions, and exacerbating the unequal distribution and access to natural resources. These issues are likely to further impact security, including the risk of terrorism, which has yet to be fully recognized at the global policymaking level. The objective of this study is to analyze the potential future connection between climate change and terrorism by assessing the strength and likelihood of climate change-related issues influencing the rate of radicalization. Relying on a foresight method, a real-time Delphi survey that allows to engage experts in discussion and gather their assessments, the research seeks to determine whether different ideological types of terrorist groups may be affected by climate change differently. To this end, three types of terrorist groups were categorized based on their ideological leanings: ethno-nationalist terrorism, religious-oriented terrorism, and “extreme wing” terrorism. Consistent with findings from the literature review, the study confirms the anticipated threat-multiplier effect of climate change, revealing that its secondary effects are highly likely to increase radicalization. While the overall influence of climate change on radicalization does not vary significantly across the three types of terrorism examined, different issues may impact radicalization within each type of terrorism in various ways, either by heightening social vulnerability or by reinforcing terrorist narratives. Recognizing climate change as a significant threat multiplier for radicalization is crucial, as it can simultaneously trigger multiple risk factors. It is essential to acknowledge climate change as a security risk and incorporate risk mitigation measures into relevant policies.

This chapter explains that Iraq is in the midst of two crises. First, it is among the most vulnerable countries to climate change and water stress putting stress on food security. Second is the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the pandemic has combined with other factors including collapsing oil prices, to drain Iraqi Government coffers of funds intended for social and war reconstruction programs. Meanwhile, extremist groups benefit from the chaos and are regaining strength. As another hot summer settles, unreliable social services and sporadic electricity coverage are diminishing popular perceptions of government legitimacy. The chapter concludes with observations about how the Government of Iraq may ameliorate this emerging issue.

The world is transitioning into a zero-carbon future. This shift needs to happen at a historically unprecedented paste. Governments are pushing for this transition by providing tax breaks, and companies are buying carbon credits to mitigate their emissions. The pace by which this is happening means that neither the international governance systems nor the corporate procurement standards are in place to mitigate the threat posed by organized crime groups or terrorist networks to take advantage of the system vulnerabilities. The risk is not only that we may see terrorist networks funded by governments or companies, but that these scandals may create a substantial public backlash against climate change mitigation, risking hampering international political efforts.

How did a group that rejects the political foundations of the U.S. grab hold of the popular imagination so quickly? And where did QAnon’s focus on hate and COVID conspiracies stem from? QAnon is a broad conspiracy theory based on the idea that democratic elite, Hollywood stars, and others are part of a satanic cannibalistic pedophile cult that must be opposed by (now former) U.S. President Donald J. Trump. Q is an anonymous person who began posting the theory online in 2017. According to QAnon, Trump is involved in a war against this satanic cabal, and the secretive “deep state” part of the government that is involved in the conspiracy. The FBI has called QAnon a domestic terror threat, and the ideas of this group have spread beyond the U.S. into Europe and other corners of the world, adapted to the local politics of various countries.

Early in the pandemic, scholars of all academic fields wondered how COVID-19 would change their areas of study. Terrorism and violent extremism researchers were no exception. By late 2020, numerous papers had been published exploring how terrorist groups around the world had reacted to the pandemic.

This edited compilation provides a wide-ranging discussion about the links between terrorism and contemporary international and national security challenges. Those contemporary security challenges can be conceptualized in two different ways. For Waltz, with his “three level analysis,” international security challenges fall in the domain of “3rd image” or “international systems level” explanatory factors for conflict (e.g., terrorism), where three or more nation-states are affected. In contrast, ‘2nd image’ factors, such as population composition and ethnic conflict potential, are found at the nation-state level. In comparison, Williams describes terrorism and many of the terrorism related security activities described in this book as “wicked challenges” or “wicked problems.”