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"Tragically timely" is the only way to describe Bruce Hoffman's Inside Terrorism. Hoffman has been working at this subject for 20 years, first at the RAND Corporation in California, then for the last several years as director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. Hoffman finished the book in January 1998. During the weeks before the book's official publication date of September 17, the daily press became a series of case studies on the themes of Hoffman's lifework:

• August 7: Bombs explode at two United States embassies in Africa, killing 10 at Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and 253 at Nairobi in Kenya, with thousands more injured.
• August 15: A car bomb detonates in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, killing 28 civilians, the majority of whom are women and children, including several from the Irish Republic.
• August 20: U.S. Cruise missiles take out the Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, and slam into suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan as reprisals against the organization of Osama bin Laden, a multimillionaire exiled from Saudi Arabia and suspected of masterminding the African attacks.
• September 3: President Clinton visits Omagh on his way back to the United States from a summit in Moscow and solemnly offers his thanks to the survivors of the blast for "restating your determination to walk the road of peace." On the same day Louis Freeh, Director of the fbi, tells the Senate Judiciary Committee that while the number of terrorist incidents around the world is declining, the casualties from such attacks are rising dramatically.
• The first week of September: The Irish and British parliaments both race to pass legislation aimed at "the Real ira" and other paramilitary splinter groups resisting the peace accord signed last Easter week by the main political factions in Northern Ireland.

If ever there was a time for a book providing informed perspective on the origins, development, goals, characteristics, stratagems, and mentalites of international terrorism, now is that time.

Inside Terrorism should not, however, be confused with what can be found in a weekly newsmagazine. Osama bin Laden and the Real IRA, for example, do not show up in its pages. Nor does it offer the detailed treatment of current incidents and terrorist groups found in official government publications.1 But what the book does treat it treats very well.

Hoffman plunges into the complexities of his topic with a nuanced history of the word itself. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution was the first modern use of the term, but as employed in France in the 1790s, terror was a means for the new regime to establish order. During the next century and more, terror was a self-conscious tool put to use by Russian constitutionalists challenging the rule of the Tsars, anarchists from several European nations lashing out at governmental oppression, militant Armenians struggling for independence from Turkey, and (with horrifying consequences in World War I) Serbian nationalists fighting the Austro-Hungarian empire. These groups used terror as outsiders wanting to bring down the system.

In the 1930s, terror took on another meaning in Germany, Italy, and Russia as Fascists and Stalinists sought to intimidate their own citizens. Western democracies quite rightly protested, although some of them (like the United States) had not too many years before countenanced analogous acts for analogous purposes of intimidation against enslaved and indigenous populations.

After World War II, terrorism swung back to a strategy of the "outs" versus the "ins." Two clusters of events from the war years were particularly significant for inspiring the ethno-nationalist aspirations that have been so important over the last half-century. First, when the British were defeated at Singapore in February 1942 and the Americans surrendered at Corregidor in May 1942, the myth of Western invincibility was shattered. Second, the Atlantic Charter, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941, turned out to have ironic effects. The charter's lofty statements defending principles of local self-determination imposed conditions on the West that, for the most part, Western nations did not intend to fulfill. In turn, that failure fueled an explosion of ethnic, nationalist, and religious anger at Western states, businesses, and institutions.

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