Bell focuses her recent study, Targets of Terror, on the people terrorist organizations earmark to eliminate, ranging from local police officials to heads of state. She notes that assassinations of heads of state, such as JFK and Indira Gandhi, are rare but do happen. At other times, terrorists target people for perceived political grievances; for instance, Bell highlights the infamous attack on Charlie Hebdo in 2015. By targeting government officials, terrorists can effectively destabilize a government’s civil infrastructure. Bell rightly claims that there is a gap in understanding who, what, when, and why some are marked for political assassinations. Her work seeks to explain why certain victims become targets and where fissures exist in the literature on terrorism that detail the consequences of those events. Bell’s volume fulfills a pressing absence in the field involving politically motivated murder, which remains an issue for governments everywhere. Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty, professionals, and general readers.

Choice Reviews

In this ambitious empirical study, Laura N. Bell, in Targets of Terror: Contemporary Assassination, explores the “who, what, when, where, and why” questions of terrorist assassinations. Bell has approached a difficult subject. Nevertheless offers food for thought.

International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence