A Fearful Symmetry: The New Soldier in the Age of Asymmetric Conflict

This title provides a new and original framework for analysis of global terrorism, with a view to understanding and resolving Islamic-based, fundamentalist jihadism.

In A Fearful Symmetry: The New Soldier in the Age of Asymmetric Conflict Professor Rumu Sarkar deploys a new set of analytical techniques to frame the phenomenon of global terrorism in a way that is both illuminating and fruitful in its practical applications for NATO, UN, and AU forces.

With innovative conceptual tools developed in her essay, “Une Symétrie de la Peur,” which was the Prix Fondation Saint-Cyr 2007 essay award winner, Sarkar uses the dialectic method to construct in A Fearful Symmetry a new critical paradigm to resolve the underlying tensions leading to global terrorism. Integral to this paradigm is Sarkar’s transformational model of the New Soldier: a warrior who uses compassion, empathy, and cultural understanding as strategic weapons of war in order to definitively end the Fearful Symmetry. These intellectual skills and emotional capabilities must be inculcated in the New Soldier, not as moral imperatives, but as key operational assets for combating global jihadism and resolving the conflicts and tensions that lead to global conflict. A Fearful Symmetry tests its paradigm against case studies of the dialectics of terrorism in failed states (e.g., Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone) and non-failed states (including Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines), the stalemates blocking state-centered solutions of zero-sum counterclaims, as in Palestine, Western Sahara, and Kashmir, and the promise of new forms of multilateral, multinational, multicultural, and multilingual task force cooperation exemplified by the experimental partnership between NATO and AU Standby Forces.

• Includes graphs and charts

• Provides a map of Islam in Africa