American Zealots

In American Zealots, Arie Perliger provides a wide-ranging and rigorously researched overview of right-wing domestic terrorism. He analyzes its historical roots, characteristics, tactics, rhetoric, and organization, assessing the current and future trajectory of the use of violence by the far right.

Arie Perliger is professor and director of the graduate program in security studies at the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His many publications on political violence include Jewish Terrorism in Israel (Columbia, 2009).

Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence:
This arresting book explores the backgrounds of right-wing activists who have terrorized America’s heartland from Oak Creek, Wisconsin to El Paso, Texas in recent decades. Far from being lone wolves, they are supported by a vast community of hatred, this revealing study shows. It descends into America’s underground cultures of violence and helps the reader understand the motivations and organizations of what has become America’s number one terrorist threat. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about the widening chasms of political extremism in the United States.

Mia Bloom, author of Small Arms: Children and Terrorism:
At a time when both DHS and the FBI have underlined the threat posed from the radical right, Arie Perliger’s American Zealots is a comprehensive and comparative study of right-wing terrorism that sheds light on how the movement emerged, grew within the US military, and our society to become the center of current domestic political debates. Using original data that he collected, the book is anchored in rigorous empirical evidence to explain how we got here and identify the path forward.

Martha Crenshaw, Stanford University:
With unparalleled expertise, Arie Perliger makes sense of the complicated and contentious reality of domestic right-wing terrorism. His explanation of the complexities, deep historical roots, and ideological diversity of the threat is clear and dispassionate. His conclusions are all the more important for being bluntly realistic: there is unlikely to be a decline in right-wing violence unless we devise a wide-ranging public policy response.

Bruce Hoffman, author of Inside Terrorism:
American Zealots is an immensely timely and important publication. Written by one of this country's foremost authorities on far-right extremist violence, it provides a comprehensive analysis of this movement's evolution and trajectory and its implications for American society and politics.