Lessons from History for Counter-Terrorism Strategic Communications

Abstract

There has been a tendency in the counter-terrorism academic and strategic-policy fields to impulsively assume that the challenges presented by 21st century extremist propaganda are unique and that history provides little more than an interesting footnote to the present. Such a perspective, in being both conceptually and thematically short-sighted, risks ignoring important lessons that can be drawn from a broader historical perspective. The Counter-Terrorism Strategic Communications (CTSC) Project’s A Brief History of Propaganda during Conflict1 placed the current challenge of understanding and confronting extremist propaganda into an historical context and identified a number of pertinent policy-relevant lessons for developing effective counter-terrorism strategic communications campaigns. Show more