Today, in the 21st century, terrorism has almost become a constant in our world: there is not a day that goes by without a small or large terrorist attack occurring at one point or another on the planet, the impact of which is potentially felt even by the entire international community.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York marked for many the beginning of a new era in historical development, and nowadays thousands of people in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe lose their lives or are affected by actions that are deemed terrorist.

However, terrorism is not a phenomenon of our time. It is as old as human history itself. In the 1st century BC, the Roman patrician Clodius Pulcher used gangs of assassins to intimidate his opponents. The Muslim Assassins of the 12th century killed and terrorized their enemies. During the French Revolution, when the term terrorism first appeared, a regime of terror was imposed. In the 19th century, Russian revolutionaries seeking the vision of socialism turned to terrorism, as did European anarchists dedicated to abolishing all forms of authority.

American workers used it as a scare tactic against industrialists, while German fascists paved the way for seizing power with it. Both Zionists and Arabs employed terrorist methods in their attempts to establish states in Palestine. Moreover, various paramilitary movements nurture the hope that acts of terrorism will hasten the Apocalypse.

Randall Law's analysis is based on three main approaches to terrorism: as a tactic, as a strategy, and as a linguistic or social construct, placing the terrorist event within its socio-political context. It aims to provide the reader with a comprehensible and concise history of terrorism, in which both the central actors and major organizations are presented, as well as the significant political, social, cultural, religious, and economic parameters that gave meaning to their actions.

In other words, the book intertwines the history of terrorism with the history of the societies that gave birth to it.