Foreword

Terrorist activities in the post-World War II phase have changed the dimensions of international as well as internal conflicts on a country to country basis as well as on agroups to country basis. These activities depend on religious sentiments, local political demands, ethnic groups, etc. According to Witschel (2003), the incident of September 11 marked a visible transformation in the nature of international terrorism. Religion replaced ideology and ethnonationalism as the most dominant motivating factor behind terrorism have acquired a global characteristic through a systematic networking between different cooperating groups.

The recently published Global Terrorism Index, 2017, report highlights a turning point in the fight against radical Islamist extremism. The main positive finding was the global decline in the number of deaths from terrorist attacks to 25,673, which is a 22 percent improvement from the peak in 2014. Currently, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria, and Pakistan are the five countries most affected by terrorism. Starting from the crisis in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has broadened its networks and accelerated its wealth position, threatening nearby countries such as Turkey, Iraq, Jordon, and Lebanon, as well as Syria itself. In fact, the impact has been on the world economy as a whole.

Terrorist activities burden the economy and society in terms of loss of GDP levels, increase in unnecessary military expenditure at the cost of social and economic developments, disincentives to the foreign investors, loss of diplomatic powers at the global level, social unrest, and increase in youth unemployment, poverty and destitutions, and political violence, among others. These issues are analyzed in this book that is divided into two sections. The first section collects contributions about global terrorism and economic and political systems and the second about the impact of terrorism on the economic and political systems of the Afro-Asian countries.

Under the aforementioned backdrop, this book seeks to reopen the analytical aspects of the effect of global terrorisms on economic and political outputs at the world level with a special emphasis upon the economies in the Afro-Asian regions.

Dr Enrico Ivaldi

Aggregate Professor of Statistics at the Department ofPolitical Science of the University of Genoa, Italy