Moving Towards the End of 20 Years of War on Terror?
Politique étrangère, Vol. 86, No. 3, Autumn 2021
Twenty years after 9/11, the assessment of the “War on Terror” is mixed: heavy financial and human costs, weakening of Al-Qaeda central and the Islamic State in the Levant, but creation of affiliates in different locations, fatigue of endless wars, etc.
The Western powers have never been able to deal with the political problems that persisted after their military successes. A new hierarchy of security challenges seems to have put terrorism in its rightful place: a strategic problem among many others.
Élie Tenenbaum is the Director of Ifri's Security Studies Center. He co-authored, with Marc Hecker, La guerre de vingt ans : djihadisme et contre-terrorisme au XXIe siècle (The Twenty Years' War: Jihadism and Counterterrorism in the XXIst Century), published by Robert Laffont in 2021.
Article published in Politique étrangère, Vol. 86, No. 3, Autumn 2021.
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Heir to a tradition dating back to the founding of Ifri, the Security Studies Center provides public and private decision-makers as well as the general public with the keys to understanding power relations and contemporary modes of conflict as well as those to come. Through its positioning at the juncture of politics and operations, the credibility of its civil-military team and the wide distribution of its publications in French and English, the Center for Security Studies constitutes in the French landscape of think tanks a unique center of research and influence on the national and international defense debate.
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