Extremist Groups: An International Compilation of Terrorist Organizations, Violent Political Groups, and Issue-Oriented Militant Movements is a reference book compiling information on over 200 groups classified as extremist.
Terrorism is, in the broadest sense, the use of intentional violence, generally against civilians, for political purposes. It is used in this regard primarily to refer to violence during peacetime or in context of war against non-combatants. The terms "terrorist" and "terrorism" originated during the French Revolution of the late 18th century but gained mainstream popularity in the 1970s in news reports and books covering the conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Basque Country and Palestine. The increased use of suicide attacks from the 1980s onwards was typified by the September 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. in 2001.
A reference work is a book or periodical to which one can refer for information. The information is intended to be found quickly when needed. Reference works are usually referred to for particular pieces of information, rather than read beginning to end. The writing style used in these works is informative; the authors avoid use of the first person, and emphasize facts. Many reference works are compiled by a team of contributors whose work is coordinated by one or more editors rather than by an individual author. Indices are commonly provided in many types of reference work. Updated editions are usually published as needed, in some cases annually. Reference works include dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias, almanacs, bibliographies, and catalogs. Many reference works are available in electronic form and can be obtained as application software, CD-ROMs, DVDs, or online through the Internet.
Contributing editor Richard H. Ward describes it (in the preface) as "part of a broader effort (on the part of the OICJ) to better understand the motivational, psychological, and sociological aspects of those who would attack societies throughout the world."
Motivation is the experience of desire or aversion…You want something, or want to avoid or escape something. As such, motivation has both an objective side – a goal or thing you aspire to – and an internal or subjective aspect: it is you that wants the thing. At minimum, motivation requires the biological substrate for physical sensations of pleasure and pain. Animals can thus want or disdain specific objects based on sense perception and experience. But motivation does not stop there. The capacity to form concepts and to reason allows humans can go beyond this minimum state, with a much greater possible range of desires and aversions. This much greater range is supported by the ability to choose one's own goals and values, combined with time horizons for value achievement that can encompass years, decades or longer, and the ability to re-experience past events. Some models treat as important the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and motivation is an important topic in work, organizational psychology, administrative organization, and management as well as education. The definition of motivation as experienced desires and aversions highlights the association of motivation with emotion. Emotions are automatic appraisals based on subconsciously stored values and beliefs about the object. To the extent that distinct emotions relate to specific subconscious appraisals, motivation theory involves specifying content theories – values that people find motivating – along with mechanisms by which they might attain these values. Changing motivation – either one's own or that of others is another focus of motivation research, for instance altering how you choose to act on your emotions, or re-programming them by modifying one's beliefs and values.
The first edition was compiled and analyzed by Jeffrey A. Builta; it was published in 1996 with 1,121 pages. The second edition was compiled by Sean Hill as Senior Researcher and Richard H. Ward as contributing editor, with a foreword by Kathleen Kiernan, Assistant Deputy Director, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. It was released in 2002 as a 961-page hardcover ( ISBN 0-942511-73-5) and paperback ( ISBN 0-942511-74-3) by the Office of International Criminal Justice and the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups at Sam Houston State University. The third edition was published in 2006, a paperback of 456 pages with 145 entries.
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier which is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.
The profile of each group provides (when able): what the group is also known as; when it was formed; its stated aims/ideology/policy; the location of its headquarters; its area of operations; its size; the nature of its structure; names of its leaders (with their position); membership information (either the type of the population recruited from, or the names of prominent members with their record); sources of its funding; its modus operandi/tactics; its publications; its business network contacts; a chronology of its significant actions and activities; a trend assessment; and sources for further reading.
An ideology is a set of normative beliefs and values that a person or other entity has for non-epistemic reasons. These rely on basic assumptions about reality that may or may not have any factual basis. The term is especially used to describe systems of ideas and ideals which form the basis of economic or political theories and resultant policies. In these there are tenuous causal links between policies and outcomes owing to the large numbers of variables available, so that many key assumptions have to be made. In political science the term is used in a descriptive sense to refer to political belief systems.
Headquarters denotes the location where most, if not all, of the important functions of an organization are coordinated. In the United States, the corporate headquarters represents the entity at the center or the top of a corporation taking full responsibility for managing all business activities. In the United Kingdom, the term head office is most commonly used for the Headquarters of large corporations. The term is also used regarding military organizations.
A modus operandi is someone's habits of working, particularly in the context of business or criminal investigations, but also more generally. It is a Latin phrase, approximately translated as modeof operating.
Daniel Pipes is an American historian, writer, and commentator. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East.
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The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, as well as describing usage in its many variations throughout the world. The second edition, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes, was published in 1989.
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Foreign Affairs is an American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. Founded in 1922, the print magazine is currently published every two months, while the website publishes articles daily and anthologies every other month.
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Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components and elements of a book into a coherent unit. In the words of the renowned typographer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), book design, "though largely forgotten today, [relies upon] methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve, [and which] have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books, these rules have to be brought back to life and applied". Richard Hendel describes book design as "an arcane subject", and refers to the need for a context to understand what that means.
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Michael Barkun is a Jewish professor emeritus of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, specializing in political extremism and the relationship between religion and violence. He is the author of a number of books on the subject, including Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (1996), A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003), and Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11 (2011).
The Reader's Digest Complete Book of Australian Birds is a book first published by Reader's Digest Services Pty Ltd of Sydney, Australia in 1976 and reprinted several times, with a completely revised edition issued in 1986.
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John Franklin Lofland is an American sociologist best known for his studies of the peace movement and for his first book, Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith, which was based on field work among a group of Unification Church members in California in the 1960s. It is considered to be one of the most important and widely cited studies of the process of religious conversion, and one of the first modern sociological studies of a new religious movement.
Information Sources in Law is a book.
The term "violent extremism" refers to the beliefs and actions of people who support or use ideologically-motivated violence to further radical ideological, religious, or political aims. Violent extremist views can manifest in connection with a range of issues, including politics, religion and gender relations. No society, religious community, or worldview is immune to violent extremism. Though "radicalization" is a contested term to some, it has come to be used to define the process through which an individual or a group comes to regard violence as a legitimate and a desirable means of action. Radical thought that does not condone the exercise of violence to further political goals may be seen as normal and acceptable, and be promoted by groups working within the boundaries of legally permitted activity. The phrase "violent extremism" may occur as a code name for Islamic terrorism.