Two leading experts in terrorism provide "smart, granular analysis" of the group's brutally effective strategy, tactics, and ideology ( Washington Post).
The Islamic State, known as ISIS, exploded into the public eye in 2014, capturing the imagination of the global jihadist movement and attracting recruits in unprecedented numbers. It also exhibited a level of sadistic violence and destruction that has alienated even the hardcore terrorists of its parent organization, al Qaeda.
In ISIS: The State of Terror, Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger trace the ideological innovations that the group deploys to recruit unprecedented numbers of Westerners, the composition of its infamous snuff videos, and the technological tools it exploits on social media to broadcast its atrocities. They also examine ISIS's predatory abuse of women and children and its use of horror to manipulate world leaders-and its own adherents-as it builds its twisted society. The authors conclude with a much-needed perspective on how world leaders should respond to ISIS's insidious provocations.

Jessica Stern is a research professor at Boston University's Pardee School of Global Studies and a Fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard's School of Public Health. She served on the Clinton administration's National Security Council Staff. She is the author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror; Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year); and The Ultimate Terrorists.

The Islamic State, known as ISIS, exploded into the public eye in 2014 with startling speed and shocking brutality. It has captured the imagination of the global jihadist movement, attracting recruits in unprecedented numbers and wreaking bloody destruction with a sadistic glee that has alienated even the hardcore terrorists of its parent organization, al Qaeda.

Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, two of America's leading experts on terrorism, dissect the new model for violent extremism that ISIS has leveraged into an empire of death in Iraq and Syria, and an international network that is rapidly expanding in the Middle East, North Africa and around the world.

ISIS: The State of Terror traces the ideological innovations that the group deploys to recruit unprecedented numbers of Westerners, the composition of its infamous snuff videos, and the technological tools it exploits on social media to broadcast its atrocities, and its recruiting pitch to the world, including its success at attracting thousands of Western adherents. The authors examine ISIS's predatory abuse of women and children and its use of horror to manipulate world leaders and its own adherents as it builds its twisted society. The authors offer a much-needed perspective on how world leaders should prioritize and respond to ISIS's deliberate and insidious provocations.