Ten years after Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group launched the now infamous ‘Manhattan raid’ on the US, the wars against religiously motivated terrorism continue. The struggle against the current wave of Islamist terrorism in places such as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Indonesia shows few signs of abating. Al-Qaeda’s meta-narrative of a fundamental clash of religious ideologies continues to resonate with small groups of militants from Morocco to the Philippines.

But as al-Qaeda enters its third decade as a global terrorist organisation, some analysts now believe that it’s suffering from a number of strategic weaknesses. The death of Osama bin Laden...

It’s clear that security and intelligence agencies around the world face a common problem—and that problem is terrorism driven by distorted religious motives that seeks to influence the minds of young Muslims everywhere.

Fuelled by the writings of prominent radicals such as the Egyptian Sayid Qutb (1906–1966) and later the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam (1941–1989), Islamism seeks to engineer a confrontation with both the West and so-called ‘apostate’ regimes in order to achieve its three primary objectives—the removal of all Western military forces and political influence from so-called ‘Muslim lands’, the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate as...

Within the field of terrorism studies, an important debate has emerged over the nature and direction of the global terrorist threat. The debate has focused on disagreements between two leading terrorism experts, Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman, which began in 2008 following a critical review of Sageman’s book, Leaderless jihad, and has continued in follow-up articles (Hoffman 2008).

The debate captures one of the most important questions in contemporary terrorism research: is the global terrorist threat primarily from coherent, structured organisations such as al-Qaeda, or is it from leaderless ‘bunches of guys’ who have bought into salafist ideology but who...

The geography of terrorism is changing. In his book, The Islamist, Ed Husain noted that Islamist groups in the United Kingdom first exploited the perceived Western indifference to the plight of Bosnian Muslims to radicalise young British recruits in the 1990s. Once recruited, those individuals then attended training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan to serve in the jihad in Bosnia.

The training of tens of thousands of mujahidin throughout the 1990s was instrumental in transferring Islamist political thinking to metropolitan centres such as London, Paris and Jakarta. The removal of the Taliban regime in 2001 and the alliance between Pakistan...

Potential terrorist uses of unconventional weapons and methods, including chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons, will remain an acute security concern for Western policymakers. The increasing availability of materials and technical knowledge through the internet, combined with al-Qaeda’s motivation for spectacular mass-casualty attacks, contributed to an assessment after 9/11 that terrorists networks are, in the words of former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, ‘inevitably going to get their hands on [weapons of mass destruction], and they would not hesitate to use them’. But there’s a great deal of misdiagnosis regarding the drivers of terrorist innovation and the current...

As a postmodern, global ideology, ‘al-Qaedaism’ isn’t in recession. Previous counterterrorism strategies that focused on defeating al-Qaeda’s organisational hubs and spokes using kinetic means have been critical in degrading the top leadership ranks, but have missed the more important goal of defeating the ideas that foment and promote extremist violence around the world.

An effective counterterrorism strategy for Australia and its international partners must continue to put pressure on the various al-Qaeda nodes in Southeast Asia, South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, but it must also look beyond those particular organisations. Lessons learned from previous counterterrorism and counterinsurgency...