Fighting terror needs evidence-based thinking
Policy-makers and those fighting terrorism should resist taking their bearings only from recent crises and analogies.
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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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