Stern in The Boston Globe on Scale of Terrorist Attacks
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, spoke at a recent a two-day National Security Conference in Cambridge that was sponsored by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston.
Stern was part of a list of speakers that included local and national law enforcement officers and terrorism experts, as well as those who provided firsthand accounts of the effects of the war against terrorists.
Discussing new challenges that terrorist groups like the Islamic State pose to security agencies, Stern noted that the scale of attack has become much smaller for newer organizations than those attacks carried out in the past by terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda.
Stern was quoted in a September 28, 2016 article in The Boston Globe entitled “Terrorism is Topic of Two-Day Conference in Cambridge.”
From the text of the article:
Unlike Al Qaeda, which worked to coordinate large-scale attacks on symbolic targets, the Islamic State encourages supporters to attack anything, anywhere. The group was allegedly the inspiration for the recent stabbing of 10 people at a mall in Minneapolis, the killing of nearly 50 people at a Florida nightclub in June, and an attack in Nice, France, in which a truck was driven into a crowd of people, the analysts said.
“These are somewhat more frightening to people because they feel they could be attacked anywhere,” said Jessica Stern, a research professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. “We’ve seen how deadly these attacks can be.”
Stern’s main focus is on perpetrators of violence and the possible connections between trauma and terror. She has written on terrorist groups across religions and ideologies, among them neo-Nazis, Islamists, anarchists, and white supremacists. She has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorists. Learn more about her here.