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The transnational nature of contemporary terrorism poses analytical challenges to conventional understandings of security that move around states as the subjects and the objects of analysis. The challenge presented by transnational terrorism is unique because of the relatively new globally-networked nature of it, aided by technology and the process of globalization.

Like criminal activities, its networking activities are carried out in secret and only its end-product as dramatic violence becomes public knowledge. Contemporary international terrorism has found its expression in the networking of various radical sub-units and disparate radical individuals within the milieu of religious fundamentalism. Given the religious fanaticism as an attribute of contemporary terrorism, it is difficult to separate religious nationalism from religious fundamentalism, since it is the logic of religious fundamentalism that gives rise to religious nationalism.

The overtly religious rhetoric of contemporary transnational terrorism finds easy audiences in many societies that are yet to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of development and modernization, particularly in those societies where any particular religion is the dominant ideology around which the state and society are structured. This networking of disparate elements means the emergence of an amorphous body of globally-networked actors that may equally participate in both global crime and transnational terrorism. The networking of phantom cells, unlike conventional understandings of terrorists who operate in largely A-line organizational structures, makes contemporary transnational terrorism operationally difficult to contain without wide-spread international co-operation between states.