Book Review: Fatal Future? Transnational Terrorism and the New Global Disorder

• Date: 01 March 2007
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567707299377
• Author: Brian Forst
• Published date: 01 March 2007
• Subject Matter: Articles

Book Reviews 57

Crimes of Art and Terror is not unlike an amusement park ride, which cannot be exited until the

ride is finished. Fortunately, to release the reader (at least me) from the ride, the authors turn to fic-

tion in chapter 7 and in the Coda. As a criminologist, I did not “get” this lapse into fiction in a work

that was already about fictional accounts of crime and terror. I honestly do not expect to ever

encounter a comparable scholarly work on crime.

G David Curry

University of Missouri–St. Louis

Pearlstein, R. M. (2004). Fatal Future? Transnational Terrorism and the New Global

Disorder. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

DOI: 10.1177/1057567707299377

One of the aftershocks of 9/11 is the gradual transformation of the field of international criminal

justice. Transnational comparisons of crime and systems of justice continue to occupy center stage

and still dominate the pages of this journal, but the beast of terrorism has burst onto the stage, and

it can be neither ignored nor dismissed. Today’s terrorism is international crime on steroids, and it

grows more lethal each year.

Richard Pearlstein’s Fatal Future? Transnational Terrorism and the New Global Disorder attempts to

make sense of these developments. The book focuses on two related subjects: the new actors attempting

to undermine the existing world order, operating primarily through transnational terrorist organizations,

and the shift from intranational to transnational conflict. Along the way, it defines terrorism, distinguishes

basic types of terrorism—ethnoterrorism, theoterrorism, and “superterrorism” (terrorist acts that produce

at least 1,000 deaths)—and briefly considers prospects for countering this new menace.

The book has several distinctive virtues. It is informed and scholarly, yet accessible to a wide

audience of students and practitioners. It is concise, with just 99 pages of text, yet meticulously

annotated, with upwards of 200 expansive endnotes and nearly 60 pages of bibliography. It is well

organized and well written and has been carefully copyedited.

Pearlstein observes that transnational terrorism has grown because of the expansion of religious

extremism, the permeability of national borders, the creation of new sources of funding and other

support, the growing availability of weapons of mass destruction, and dramatic advances in com-

munication technology, which have provided a pathway for Western cultural mores and decadence

to intrude on and disrupt traditional conservative settings and for terrorists to access intelligence and

coordinate their activities.

In the chapter on ethnoterrorism, Pearlstein offers compelling examples of ethnic genocide, from

the Turkish slaughter of a million Armenians in 1915 to the Serbian killing of some 200,000

Croatians and Muslims in Bosnia in the 1990s, describing along the way the Nazi Holocaust of some

6 million Jews in the 1940s and several other monstrous annihilations. He identifies and describes

several transnational terrorist groups that arose in the process, including the Armenian Secret Army

for the Liberation of Armenia and a variety of Chechen ethnoterrorist organizations along the south-

ern border of Russia. He notes a supreme and often tragic irony: Globalization may contribute sig-

nificantly to the cohesion and retribalization of ethnic minorities following diaspora. The technology

that was supposed to build a global community—satellite television, the Internet, and cell phones—

has served no less to deepen ghettoization in alien lands.

His chapter on theoterrorism begins with a critical point that is too often lost on the general pub-

lic: Each of the major religions has a strong corps of moderates who subscribe to the principles of