Introduction

This book looks into four areas of our world's international security crisis: the growing threat of America's homegrown jihadists, the continuing rise of terrorism, the causes of gross violations of human rights, and the pervasiveness of civil war.

When American jihadists join such international terrorist organizations as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Al Qaeda, the danger to security and stability is often magnified on both global and domestic fronts. The global rise of terrorism in turn causes a deterioration in the quality of human rights for politically disadvantaged people or minority groups within a national territory; meanwhile, the internal crisis created by terrorist violence and human rights violations can expedite the development of civil war, which is likely to endanger domestic and international stability.

Taking a consistent theoretical and empirical approach, Emerging Security Challenges: American Jihad, Terrorism, Civil War, and Human Rights explicates the relationships among these four closely related areas of concern for national security. Each chapter presents systematic, empirical evidence of security trends for more than 100 sample countries, determined using the most current statistical methods, and concludes with practical policy recommendations.