The Paris attack: people are made to pay for disastrous government policies

There is a wide range of reasoned arguments (Jonathan Matusitz, Terrorism and Communications, Sage, 2013) on why terrorism occurs and each implies different policies for combating it. The terrorist attacks over the last decade call for new thinking though and here the public is ahead of political scientists and policy-makers. Although united in their abhorrence of terrorist attacks of all types, ordinary people are also asking serious questions about the link between the increased security threat faced by their countries and the explicit or tacit support that their governments have provided to terrorist groups, including finance, training and arming. They are also asking questions about their governments’ continued strategic partnerships with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, where the governments have been supporting various terrorist groups in Syria to achieve foreign policy objectives. This is a new phenomenon that coincided with military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.