Fighting terror needs evidence-based thinking
Policy-makers and those fighting terrorism should resist taking their bearings only from recent crises and analogies.
New York
AS policymakers and analysts wrestle with how to respond to the advancing Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL) extremists - also known as the Islamic State Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Islamic State - there is a danger of falling victim to a pervasive disease in international politics which might be called "recent-ism".
This is the hard-to-resist temptation to look no further back than the most recent crisis or analogy to develop policy. "Recent-ism" affects counter-terrorism, too; it's easy to make sweeping generalisations about how the threat is new and profoundly different.
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