Eye On L. Richardson´s Three R´s

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict, Security, grade: 2,3, University of the Federal Armed Forces München, language: English, abstract: One of the major changes regarding post 9/11 terrorist-studies is rarely taken notice of: The sudden and more urgent than ever before manifested strive to understand terrorism in its roots and methods by both political decision makers and society. Seemingly almost in accordance to the political behavior of the former S-administration, promptly demanded answers for questions of a kind not being posed before by the public, led to quite a variety of outcomes that can be subsumed the same way the socio-critical American journalist Henry Louise Mencken noted as early as 1920: 'There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.'. This paper takes a close look at the three R´s of revenge, renown and reaction that the wellknown political scientist Louise Richardson identified as the immediate motives of terrorists and hence sine qua non for the phenomenon.