The threat of terrorism is now part of the landscape of daily lives all over the world, yet although we have begun to live with the idea of it, we have hardly yet been able to think properly about it. Terror and Consent argues that, like so many states and civilizations in the past which suffered defeat, we are fighting the last war, with weapons which were useful to us then but which have now been superceded. This book aims to provide a fundamental rethinking of most generally accepted ideas about terror in the modern world – what it is, how it operates and above all how it can be frustrated. The answers have very little to do with heightened security at airports. Instead, Phillip Bobbitt argues, we need to reforge the links which previous societies have made between law and strategy; to realize how the evolution of modern states, which have always produced terrorists in their own image, has now produced a globally networked terrorism that will change as fast as we can identify it; to combine humanitarian interests with strategies of intervention; and above all to rethink what ’victory’ in such a war, if it is a war, might look like – no occupied capitals, no treaties, no victory parades, but the continuance of states of consent.