Jeffery Kaplan

Jeffery Kaplan

University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, USA

kaplanuwosh [dot] edu

Jeffery Kaplan is the author or editor of 20 books and over 80 articles and anthology chapters on religious violence, millenarianism, terrorism and oppositional religious movements. His most recent monograph is Apocalypse, Revolution and Terrorism: From the Sicari to the American Revolt Against the Modern World, which was published by Routledge in 2019. He has also published the career retrospective Radical Religion and Violence: Theory and Case Studies, as the first volume in the Routledge Distinguished Author series. He is Book Review Editor for Terrorism and Political Violence. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Doctoral School on Safety and Security Sciences,  Óbudai University and a Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest.

Threats to Critical Infrastructure and Counterterrorism Responses

Abstract

With the decline of Al Qaeda and the destruction of the Islamic State’ Racca base, terrorist attacks have increasingly focused on infrastructural targets rather than mass casualty attacks on the model of 9/11 and 7/7. At the same time, interstate conflicts have moved almost entirely from the traditional field of battle to the virtual world of cyber attacks and political destabilization under the banner of hybrid warfare. As terrorist capabilities have been dwarfed by the resources available to states, interstate conflict obviously presents a far greater threat than do terrorist attacks. Yet the symmetrical pattern of interstate conflict and asymmetrical patterns of terrorist strikes are not unrelated when national and industrial infrastructures are the target. This talk will therefore present a broad overview of critical infrastructural vulnerabilities and CT responses.