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Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks
Loretta Napoleoni
Written in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, Modern Jihad reframes terrorism as an economy rather than an ideology. Loretta Napoleoni, an economist who specializes in the financing of political violence, follows the money instead of the theology, mapping what she calls a "New Economy of Terror" that runs on narcotics, arms, front businesses, charities, and illicit finance and quietly entangles armed groups with Western markets. Religion, in her reading, is largely a recruiting device; the engine is cash. Drawing on interviews with former militants, intelligence officials, and economists, she ranges across the IRA, Basque and Latin American groups, African insurgencies, and Islamist networks. It suits readers who want the structural, follow-the-dollars view of insurgency that dominated post-9/11 policy debates, and who are comfortable weighing big, contested numbers.
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The author
Loretta Napoleoni is an Italian economist and journalist who studied at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the London School of Economics before specializing in the economics of terrorism and money laundering. She has advised governments and institutions on terror finance and written a string of books on the subject.
The book
Modern Jihad (Pluto Press, 2003; issued in the United States as Terror Incorporated) argues that armed groups are best understood as businesses. Tracing money rather than motive, Napoleoni describes a global "New Economy of Terror" worth hundreds of billions of dollars that binds insurgents to legitimate markets, and treats religious ideology largely as a recruitment tool riding atop a financial engine.
How it has aged
The follow-the-money framework was ahead of its time and anticipated a decade of policy focus on choking off terror financing; as a corrective to purely ideological accounts it still reads sharply. Its weakness is quantitative: several of its headline figures are hard to verify, and specialists have questioned the scale of her estimates. They are best treated as arguments to test rather than audited totals. The structural insight has aged better than the accounting.
For more context
Read alongside Napoleoni's later Terror Incorporated and Rogue Economics for the fuller thesis.
Sources - Publishers Weekly review - Internet Archive record
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Loretta Napoleoni
- Publisher
- Pluto Press
- Place of publication
- London
- Year
- 2003
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Colorado