Accounts of the relationships between states and terrorist organizations in the Cold War era have long been shaped by speculation, a lack of primary sources and even conspiracy theories. In the last few years, however, things have evolved rapidly. Using a wide range of case studies including the British State and Loyalist Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, as well as the United States and Nicaragua, this book sheds new light on the relations between state and terrorist actors, allowing for a fresh and much more insightful assessment of the contacts, dealings, agreements and collusion with terrorist organizations undertaken by state actors on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
This book presents the current state of research and provides an assessment of the nature, motives, effects, and major historical shifts of the relations between individual states and terrorist organizations. The articles collected demonstrate that these state-terrorism relationships were not only much more ambiguous than much of the older literature had suggested but are, in fact, crucial for the understanding of global political history in the Cold War era.
Overall, the two volumes of Terrorism in the Cold War represent an important ontological contribution to our understanding of why and how state interact and, in some cases, create alliances with violent non-state actors. The volumes of essay will be of interest to all those looking to appreciate the complexity of state-terrorist relations and grasp the paradoxes born out of these liaisons ... By using new evidence to reconnect the dots on state-terrorist relations, these essays help us rethink what we know about the international history of terrorism as well as the Cold War
