As international terrorism has grown over the past decades, airlines and airports have become increasingly popular targets for violent attacks and hijackings. In this volume, Peter St. John provides a survey of international air piracy and airline terrorism, and of the ways airline professionals and governments are coping, or attempting to cope, with the crisis. St. John not only deals with the history, politics, psychology, and sociology of air piracy, but also provides an assessment of the threat to commercial aircraft and ways to counter the danger. The principal theme he develops is that security for airports and aircraft can be achieved, and the fear of terrorists overcome, if Western countries cooperate in installing effective security policies and plans. St. John begins his work with a two-chapter history of the evolution of hijacking, tracing the five-to-seven-year cycles that seem to have emerged and the growth of the politically motivated hijacking that has become the most persistent and dangerous form. He next analyzes the eight types of individuals who have hijacked aircraft in the past, their different motives, and how they can be identified by airport security and flight crews. A major chapter discusses the politics of Western governments toward highjacking in Europe and North America, and identifies the best and worst airports around the globe. A seven-stage system of security that will probably be a necessity for the 1990s is also proposed. Ensuing chapters address the problem of the hijacked plane, offering advice for passengers and crew members who are victims of hijacking, and for government behavior, which often does more to encourage air terrorism than to prevent it. Finally, St. John looks to the future of airport security and describes the need for a concentrated attempt at all levels of national and international government to develop effective defenses against air piracy. A group of appendices is also included, documenting the principal hijacks of the past forty years as well as sabotage attempts on commercial aircraft. This work will be an important reference tool for professionals in security services and the airline and airport management field, and for students in political science and international relations courses. It will also be a valuable addition to college, university, and public libraries.

Terrorism is a persistent form of political violence, but it appears intermittently, afflicting certain places in certain eras while others remain unscathed. Since the late nineteenth century, it has risen and fallen in recurrent generation-long spasms in which hundreds of short-lived groups wreak havoc. Why have past outbreaks of terror tended to come in waves, and how does this pattern shed light on future threats? David C. Rapoport, a preeminent scholar of political violence, identifies and analyzes four distinct waves of global terrorism. He examines the dynamics of each wave, contrasting their tactics, targets, and goals and placing them in the context of the much longer history of terrorism. Global terror emerged in the 1880s after technological changes transformed communication and transportation and dynamite enabled individuals or small groups to carry out bombings. Emanating from Russia, a first wave of anarchists assassinated prominent figures in what they called “propaganda of the deed.” This was followed by a second wave of anticolonial terrorism that arose in the British Empire in the 1920s. Beginning in the 1960s, a third wave of New Left movements took hostages and hijacked airplanes. Most recently, religious movements—mostly but not entirely in the Islamic world—have constituted a fourth wave, pioneering self-martyrdom or suicide bombing. Rapoport also considers whether a fifth wave of anti-immigrant or white supremacist terror is emerging today. Recasting the complex history of modern political violence, Waves of Global Terrorism makes a major contribution to our understanding of the roots of contemporary terrorism.

This book offers an extraordinary wealth of information, from the ground up, of the law governing and regulating air transport today, with a strong emphasis on international aviation. A team of distinguished authors in the field of aviation law provide a cogent synthesis from which sound legal opinions and strategies of legal action may be confidently built. Among the many topics here in depth are the following: definition and classification of airspace; distinction between civil and state aircraft; air navigation and air traffic control services; airport charges and overflight charges; structure of ICAO; standard-setting functions and audit functions of ICAO; functions of the International Air Transport Association (IATA); policy and effects of deregulation and liberalization of air transport policy; the International Registry for Aircraft Equipment; air carrier liability regimes and claims procedure; measures to combat aviation terrorism, air piracy and sabotage; and the Open Skies Agreements. This publication cites significant legislation and court rulings, including from the United States and the European Union, where far-reaching measures on market access, competition and passenger rights have set trends for other regions of the world. The special case of Latin America has a chapter to itself. At a time when commercial aircraft have been used as lethal weapons for the first time, aviation law finds itself in the front line of responsibility for maintaining global aviation security.

First Published in 1999. The recent conviction of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef for plotting what prosecutors called '48 hours of terror in the sky' by conspiring to bomb a dozen US airliners, the increasing number of man portable SAM attacks on aircraft, and the recent crash of a hijacked Ethiopian airliner off the Comoro Islands causing 127 deaths, show that aviation confronts a wide range of security threats. The aim of this volume, published ten years after Lockerbie, is to assess the changing threats to aviation security. It is a sad fact that despite major efforts by certain states to enhance security, much more needs to be done to remedy weaknesses in international aviation security if further Lockerbies are to be prevented. The contributors examine threats and vulnerabilities in the light of recent developments in aviation security and consider the prospects for strengthening the response at national and international levels. The study is of obvious relevance not only to security and academic specialists but also to the international civil aviation community and national policy makers.

While there is no easy way to define terrorism, it may generally be viewed as a method of violence in which civilians are targeted with the objective of forcing a perceived enemy into submission by creating fear, demoralization, and political friction in the population under attack. At one time a marginal field of study in the social sciences, terrorism is now very much in center stage. The 1970s terrorist attacks by the PLO, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Japanese Red Army, the Unabomber, Aum Shinrikyo, Timothy McVeigh, the World Trade Center attacks, the assault on a school in Russia, and suicide bombers have all made the term terrorism an all-too-common part of our vocabulary.This edition of Political Terrorism was originally published in the 1980s, well before some of the horrific events noted above. This monumental collection of definitions, conceptual frameworks, paradigmatic formulations, and bibliographic sources is being reissued in paperback now as a resource for the expanding community of researchers on the subject of terrorism. This is a carefully constructed guide to one of the most urgent issues of the world today.When the first edition was originally published, Choice noted, This extremely useful reference tool should be part of any serious social science collection. Chronicles of Culture called it a tremendously comprehensive book about a subject that any who have anything to lose--from property to liberty, life to limbs--should be forewarned against.

However, the forces of law have failed to keep ahead of advancing threats. As hijacking has become more difficult, terrorists have adopted new tactics, such as sabotage bombing. Thus, while the 1960s and the 1970s were the age of aircraft hijackings, the 1980s could be said to be the age of sabotage bomb attacks in civil aviation history.