I agree, it's rather appalling scholarship and it’s disappointing that this is being taken seriously here. A novice writes a paper with no citations, an amateur

I agree, it's rather appalling scholarship and it’s disappointing that this is being taken seriously here. A novice writes a paper with no citations, an amateur writes one with practically nothing but them. Any one of the academic articles he links to would shed more light on the topic, on its own, than this essay does in its entirety. The observation that terrorism is somewhat socially driven is interesting but should be backed by a deeper frame of reference, and one that the authors of those papers surely understood: the larger goals of an organization like Al Qaeda don’t align at all with traditional political demands. The long term strategy involves attacking the US to draw them into open war with a muslim country, spreading the conflict to neighboring regions, mobilizing local resistance to the invaders (as in Afghanistan) and drawing the west into a war of attrition. In this sense they’ve been startlingly successful, and a focus on social capital and “branding”, as opposed to concrete demands of existing governments, is actually quite strategic. Whatever commonality this has with the IRA, the FARC, or even Hezbollah and Hamas is superficial at best.