■ Kurnaz, Murat, 2008. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ix + 255 pp. ISBN 9780230603745
| Published date | 01 July 2009 |
| Date | 01 July 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/00223433090460040807 |
| Author | David Isenberg |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 46 / number 4 / july 2009
602
poverty should be welcomed, we should not
believe that they will reduce international terror-
ism. Also, the fight against poverty could suffer,
in the long run, from being held captive by the
efforts to combat terrorism. Equally important,
the non-finding provides important insights
into the causes of terrorism. It suggests that eco-
nomic models of terrorism fail. Terrorists should
be conceived of as highly emotionally engaged
political actors, rather than greedy criminals.
This short, well-crafted book should be read by
anyone interested in the causes and consequences
of terrorism.
Helge Holtermann
Kurnaz, Murat, 2008. Five Years of My
Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan. ix + 255 pp.
ISBN 9780230603745.
If one has to choose one book about the disgraceful
practices approved by the Bush administration in
its ‘war on terror’, ranging from the merely inhu-
mane conduct in violation of the Geneva Con-
ventions to outright torture and murder, make it
this one. Murat Kurnaz was a Turk legally living
in Germany. A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks,
he travelled to Pakistan and spent time visiting
various mosques to learn more about his Muslim
religion. He was stopped at a police checkpoint
and handed over to the US military, which first
imprisoned him at a military base in Kandahar,
Afghanistan and then transferred him to the
prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His account
of the five years of imprisonment, suffering, tor-
ture and detention without trial he experienced
stands as a shameful indictment of the United
States’ choice to use classic totalitarian techniques
and place itself among the lowest of human rights
violators. Although President Obama has issued
orders closing Guantanamo and CIA prisons,
ending CIA torture and suspending proceed-
ings at military tribunals, his nominees have said
the administration will continue the policy of
‘extraordinary rendition’ of terrorism suspects –
code for secret kidnapping without any legal
rights. Also, while Obama supposedly banned
CIA torture, such executive orders are not laws
and can be reversed with the stroke of a pen. The
new Justice Department has pledged to continue
detaining prisoners indefinitely without trial. And
the new administration has continued to use the
‘state secrets’ doctrine to try to cancel lawsuits by
to German military thought during the First
World War. The breadth of issues is matched
by the span in methodological approaches cho-
sen by the different authors. They range from
Robert Bates’s game-theoretic analysis of politi-
cal order in Africa to Jung et al.’s use of survey
data to compare the successfully negotiated tran-
sition in South Africa with the failed attempts
in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Although the
book is remarkable in its scope and should be
read by anyone studying order, conflict or vio-
lence, it seems that something is missing. The
editors organize the book along four sets of axes,
and these axes are supposed to bind together the
different contributions, and hence the study of
order, conflict and violence. Unfortunately, this
reader nevertheless concludes that the different
contributions do not really manage to answer the
question of how order, conflict and violence are
tied together. This may, however, be because the
contributions stem from different disciplines.
Håvard M. Nygård
Krueger, Alan B., 2007. What Makes a
Terrorist? Economics and the Roots of Terrorism.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. xi +
180 pp. ISBN 9780691134383.
This interesting book is mainly about a non-
finding, namely, how international terrorism
appears not to be linked to poverty or lack of
education. The book is based on the three Lionel
Robbins lectures that Krueger gave at the London
School of Economics and Political Science in
February 2006. Two chapters treat the causes of
international terrorism, and a third examines its
consequences. The evidence presented by Krueger
and others quite convincingly suggests that there
is no poverty–terrorism relationship. If anything,
people involved in international terrorism tend to
be better-off and more educated than the average
of their society. Moreover, there is no significant
relationship between a country’s GDP per capita
and the likelihood of a terrorist emanating from
it, controlling for civil liberties. Although the
data have limitations, these studies should shift
the burden of proof onto those who believe that
terrorism is linked to poverty. Unfortunately, this
non-finding has not received its due attention,
and the belief that poverty is a root cause of ter-
rorism remains widespread among policymakers,
with misguided policies as a potential result. As
Krueger argues, although efforts to reduce world
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