Hollingsworth 1

Jada Hollingsworth
February 28, 2016
INT Conceptual Globalization

Terrorism in the year 2026:

How the global battle against terrorism will change in ten years.

Terrorism has been a huge ordeal in the United States for the past 15 years. It feels like
the 9-11-01 bombing was decades ago, but it is not as far away as we all think. They didnt even
find the founder of Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, until 2011, which was 10 years after the event
itself. It could feel as if terrorism is getting better, because of the demise of one of our largest
terrorist enemies but as one enemy falls into the dust, another emerges: Isis. Will terrorism get
better in 10 years, like the case with the 9-11 bombing or is this the beginning of something far
worse?
Before getting into how terrorism will change, one must first know what terrorism is now.
Martha Crenshaw stated that the study of terrorism can be divided into three questions: why
terrorism occurs, how terrorism works, and what are its social and political effects. According to
Richard Payne, in Global Issues, terrorism can be defined as an act designed to cause fear and
selective violence against certain targets in order to exert pressure on governments (Payne,
2013). They have even been saying that traumatic events on American soil have been acts of
terrorism, like the Boston marathon bombing for instance. Even the attack in France from last
year has been described as terrorism. This book also states that poverty, globalization,
legitimate grievances and the failure of governments, humiliation, lack of democracy, foreign
policies, and failed states are the most common reasons for terrorism. Terrorist groups are
usually self-sufficient, meaning that the members of the organizations pay for all of their

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expenses, such as Bin Laden did for Al-Qaeda. Since terrorist attacks usually come from smaller,
less civilized areas, some organizations use natural resources such as oil and jewels to fund their
organizations acts of terrorism.
Considering social media, in terms of Isis, terrorism definitely has the potential to get
worse because everything is basically at your fingertips, and Isis can manage to cultivate
popular support with their virtual networks, as well as gaining popularity from social media
pages and outlandish behavior on the internet to gain attention. (Payne, 2013) Evidence of Isis
outlandish behavior on social media is in an article by Hope King stating that Isis supporters
posted a video online calling out the creators of Twitter and Facebook saying, A slide toward
the end of the video reads, in English: "To Mark and Jack, founders of Twitter and Facebook /
and to their Crusader government / You announce daily that you suspended many of our accounts
/ And to you we say: Is that all you can do? You are not in our league. If you close one account
we will take 10 in return and soon your names will be erased after we delete your sites, Allah
willing, and will know that we say is true. #Sons_Caliphate_Army" (King, 2016). They are
threatening US citizens from where ever they are hiding in Islam, or with globalization, possibly
anywhere.
In ten years, the hope is that terrorism will have changed: that it will no longer be an
issue or that there will be some way around it. However, it is just the beginning of organizations
coming out of the woodworks and with that being the case, 10 years may be enough time for
things to get increasingly worse. If indeed poverty, globalization, legitimate grievances and the
failure of governments, humiliation, lack of democracy, foreign policies, and failed states are
the causes of terrorism now, the fact that these are things that will exist 10 years from now,
proves that terrorism will most likely continue to be a problem, not only 10 years from now but

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also farther into the future. Jennifer Lerner stated that fear was a main basis for September 11,
and there will always be plenty fear for terrorist attacks now as well as in the future. The United
Nations are looking for a way to stop terrorism, stating that terrorist acts are criminal and that
no cause can justify terrorism. The United Nations has also stated that Member States,
through the General Assembly, have been increasingly coordinating their counter-terrorism
efforts and continuing their legal norm-setting work. The Security Council has also been active
in countering terrorism through resolutions and by establishing several subsidiary bodies. At the
same time a number of programmers, offices and agencies of the United Nations system have
been engaged in specific activities against terrorism, further assisting Member States in their
counter-terrorism efforts. To consolidate and enhance these activities, Member States in
September 2006 embarked upon a new phase in their counter-terrorism efforts by agreeing on a
global strategy to counter terrorism. The Strategy marks the first time that all Member States of
the United Nations have agreed to a common strategic and operational framework to fight
terrorism. The Strategy forms a basis for a concrete plan of action: to address the conditions
conducive to the spread of terrorism; to prevent and combat terrorism; to take measures to build
state capacity to fight terrorism; to strengthen the role of the United Nations in combating
terrorism; and to ensure the respect of human rights while countering terrorism. Hopefully with
the United Nations being a huge power in globalization and authority between countries, there
will not be any escalations in terrorism, but one may never know.

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References
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911 Facts. <http://www.911facts.net/> 12 April 2010. Web.
Payne, R. J. (2013). Global issues: Politics, economics, and culture (4th ed.). Boston, Ma.:
Pearson.
King, Hope. (2016). CNN. <http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/technology/isis-markzuckerberg/index.html> 26 February 2016. Web.
Crenshaw, M. (1981). The Causes of Terrorism. Comparative Politics, 13(4), 379399.
<http://doi.org/10.2307/421717> Web.
Lerner, Jennifer et al. (2003) Psychological Science March 2003 vol. 14 no. 2 144-150
<http://pss.sagepub.com/content/14/2/144.short> Web.
United Nations. <http://www.un.org/en/terrorism/> 28 February 2016. Web.