Understanding Terrorist Finance as Interaction with Value Chains

This chapter continues our journey toward a more unified and coherent understanding of terrorist finance, and argues that much activity currently represented as “terrorist financing” can be more accurately represented as the dynamics by which terrorist actors (however defined) access, influence, control, or otherwise interact with flows of value within existing local, regional, or global political economies. As such, the chapter examines how terrorist actors access and interact with particular value chains. It intends both to provide insight into the participation of terrorists with local and global political economies (many of which would typically be considered legitimate and legal) and to demonstrate the theoretical benefits of reorienting research toward this end. This latter point emphasizes the book’s larger claim that it contributes a superior way of representing and giving meaning to those activities now encompassed by the term “terrorist finance.”