Values and Violence

In this volume an unusual array of elite scholars addresses the role of values in understanding terrorism and forming policies for responses to it. Their essays, which appear here for the first time, have significance in the fears and concerns of the moment but the enduring values they espouse extend far beyond terrorism.


Contributors include Akeel Bilgrami, M. Cherif Bassiouni, Martha Crenshaw, Tom Farer, Marilyn Friedman, Amos Guiora, Bruce Hoffman, Martha Nussbaum, Frank Salter, and Amartya Sen.


"This is a remarkable collection of many of the best minds pondering the terrorist threat. . . . The international community needs to do much better than we have been doing; here is the intellectual platform for doing so."
Michael W. Doyle
Harold Brown Professor of International Affairs,
Law and Political Science, Columbia University


"Seven years after 9/11, policymakers are still struggling to understand the dynamics that produce terrorism in ways that help them craft better approaches for confronting the challenge of political violence. In Values and Violence, some of America‘s and the world’s top scholars come together to provide a state-of-the-art assessment of these issues.  I know of no other single volume that brings together this much talent to try to help the world understand the sources of the scourge of terrorism and, thereby, to help us understand how to contain it."
Philip Gordon
Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution,
Washington D.C.


"If you want a broad and sophisticated inter-disciplinary approach to terrorism to understand the role of values both in forming terrorist activity and in responding to its challenges, this reader is for you."
Shahram Chubin
Director of Studies, Geneva Centre for Security Policy