SEST 605 Terrorism: Middle East & North Africa

Bruce Hoffman

Tuesday 6:3o PM to 9:00 PM

Terrorism has long been a means of political expression in the Middle East and has flourished throughout the region from antiquity to the present. This seminar surveys the arc and evolution of terrorism from the Sicarii and the Assassins through the violence and rebellions in Egypt and Palestine of the 1920s through the end of World War II. The anti-colonial campaigns in both those places as well as in Algeria, Iraq, and Yemen–the persistence of both Palestinian and Jewish extremist violence, the emergence of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the salience of state-sponsored terrorism across the region, the insurgencies in Iraq, the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS, and the ongoing upheaval in Syria, Libya, the Sinai, and Yemen.