The Conflict Research Society (CRS), an organization in the United Kingdom dedicated to conflict research, has shortlisted Vera Mironova’s first book for their 2020 Book of the Year Prize. The book, "From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists: Human Resources of Non-State Armed Groups," was the first title published in the START-Oxford University Press book series.
The CRS selects contemporary and particularly innovative books that focus on conflict and peace studies to receive the annual award. Last year, the prize committee received over 50 nominations from conflict and peace researchers, institutions, practitioners and publishers from all over the world.
“From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists” explores Mironova’s experiences being embedded with Iraqi Special Forces and interviewing members of the Islamic State.
About the book series
START partnered with Oxford University Press to sponsor the interdisciplinary book series. The series approaches terrorism conceptually as having a developmental life-cycle that includes: (1) the origins of political extremism and the formation of terrorist groups; (2) terrorist dynamics and persistence; and (3) societal responses to terrorism.
The editorial team intends for the books—each about 200-300 pages in length, or about 80,000 words—to be accessible to a broad audience, including scholars, graduate students, policymakers and practitioners, while being rooted in rigorous social science.
Each of the books in the series must explore the topic of terrorism in a manner that is at once theoretically informed, empirically grounded and policy relevant. The series aims to fill gaps in earlier scholarship on terrorism, which was sometimes limited in the topics that it could address and the insights it could derive by both a dearth of data and the attention of only a handful of academic disciplines.
The series as a whole will not be restricted to U.S. concerns or any single discipline, but will assess the phenomenon of terrorism globally, comparatively and from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Proposal information and instructions can be found on START’s website.