The cover of this edition of eJournal USA captures a Russian woman's horror as she gazes at photographs of children killed in the terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, Russia, in 2004. Some 330 people, more than half of them children, died when Chechen terrorists in opposition to the Russian government took more than 1,200 hostages by seizing the school and wiring it to explode.

The woman's face registers a universal response to such horrific mass violence—anguish, shock, incomprehension. As John Horgan, of St. Andrews University's Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, writes in this issue, the most common reaction to terrorist atrocities is baffled revulsion: "How could anyone do this?" And, of course, there is a second question to ask: What can be done to thwart the networks that recruit those who become terrorists and perform such acts?

To provide some answers to these questions and take a comprehensive look at the complex, global problem of terrorism, the editors of eJournal USA invited many of the world's leading scholars in this field to examine the motivations of those who carry out terrorist attacks and the techniques that terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida use to recruit and motivate them.

In our opening interview, award-winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy describes the effects of terrorism on Afghan child refugees. Other essays put the phenomenon in a historical context, examine how terrorists are psychologically able to justify the killing of innocents, and delineate how they use the media and theatrical techniques to manipulate the public and spread their message. Several case studies analyze the recruitment of suicide bombers in Iraq and profile women who become terrorists. We conclude with an article by Australian counterterrorism expert David Kilcullen, who identifies terrorism as a new kind of threat, one that requires new paradigms for developing strategies to combat it.

It is only by understanding the terrorist mentality that civil societies can hope to counter terrorist tactics effectively.

—The Editors