Contemporary violent non-state actors are becoming political, economic, and administrative competitors to the state — and counterterrorism built for the last generation of threats will not defeat this one.
September 16 2026 – By the HORN International Institute for Strategic Studies
THE ISSUE
Terrorism scholarship and policy still default to David Rapoport’s four-wave model, which begins in the 1870s and treats religiously-motivated transnational terrorism — al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the 1979 Iranian Revolution — as the most recent phase of the problem. Scholars at the Horn Institute argue that this framework is now out of date. A new configuration has emerged over roughly the past 25 years in which religion, politics, local grievance, self-financing, territorial control, and digital influence no longer sit alongside one another but actively reinforce one another — fifth-generation terrorism — and it demands a different theory of the threat and a different counterterrorism response.