This lecture is free and open to the public

Professor Mack's presentation will examine the recent decline in the incidence of terrorism around the world and the dramatic drop in support for the loose-knit Islamist terror network associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda in Muslim countries. This shift is part of a broader decline in overall political violence––armed conflicts as well as terrorism. But while both warfare and Islamist terrorism have declined the drivers of change are very different.

The decline in fatalities from Islamist terrorism owes little to the US-led Global War in Terror but a great deal to the growing revulsion in the Muslim world against the ideology, policies and gratuituous violence against civilians that have been the hallmarks of Islamist strategy. Al Qaeda has become its own worst enemy.

While the decline in terrorism is good news it is less important than the global decline in armed conflicts––Islamist terror groups kill only a tiny fraction of those killed in warfare. The extent of this decline has been extraordinary. All forms of conflict are down by 40 percent since the early 1990s––high intensity conflicts are down by 80%.

Unlike terrorism, this change has a great deal to do with security policies pursued by the international community––though not with conflict prevention policies which are more talked about than practiced.

Nor does it owe much to shifts in slow-changing ‘structural' variables like income per capita or unemployment rates among marginalized youth in poor countries that have been the focus of much recent statistical research by Paul Collier and others.

Professor Mack will argue that the decline in political violence has come about in part because the end of the Cold War removed a major driver of armed conflict from the international system, but that it is due mostly to the fact that the ‘peacemaking' and ‘peacebuilding'

policies of the much-maligned UN. These have helped stop ongoing wars––and prevented them from restarting again.

For further information, please contact:
Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy,
T: 6125 7983,
E:ExecutiveOfficer.APCD@anu.edu.au/

No RSVP required