New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism. By Barry Cooper. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. 264p. $44.95.

Barry Cooper argues that a characteristic of modern terrorism is the rise of “new political religions” that claim to be engaged in spiritual conflicts that transcend the political realm and that involve waging spiritual warfare in order to realize an idealized spiritual kingdom on this earth. Thus, in order to understand contemporary terrorism, Cooper states, one must look at the “spirituality that terrorists experience as central to their own activities” (p. 7), while recognizing that religious terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and Japan's Aum Shinrikyô, do not operate within the frameworks of cost-benefit analysis that political terror groups have generally espoused (p. 55). He further contends that religious terrorists groups are on a continuous treadmill of violence that is self-generating and will never cease (p. 12), leading him to advocate extreme measures (negotiation not being one of them) to counteract it. Here he seems not to consider that similar arguments were once advanced to suggest that political terrorists were equally bound up in a cycle of violence from which they could not escape, yet there are many examples (the African National Congress and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), for example) that have disproved such perceptions.