The Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and other movements espousing radical, often transnational gendas, are protagonists in many of today's deadliest wars, complicating efforts to end them. Their military potency, local roots and fréquent Infighting between their enemies suggest that defeating them by military means alone will be hard; yet they espouse goals difficult to accommodate in negotiated Settlements. Beyond warzones, they threaten stability and social cohesion in other states.
The role of non-state actors in conflict is nothing new; but their impact, in terms of violence, of human dislocation, and of undermining the fabric of the state is severe and growing, as is their capacity to project violence from long-range, and in turn provoke dramatic response. The transnational nature of many non-state threats means that they defy a response that is only state-centric. This phenomena presents existential challenges to the state, to human security and to the international community's effective ability to mitigate, let alone hait, violent conflict. Given these groups' prominence and that many of the underlying conditions they feed off appear to be deepening, understanding their nature, the factors driving their rise, the parallels and différences between different groups and the evolving threat they pose will be vital to forging credible policy responses.
In 2016, Crisis Group launched a new body of work on the evolving threat posed by radical, non-state actors, both in warzones and more widely. This intends to better integrate the global, regional and transnational dimensions of conflict and other threats into its work. While retaining Crisis Group's field-based research and reserve of local knowledge and contacts, this will be augmented by increasing analysis of the regional and such thematic dimensions; this in turn will help to draw wider lessons from working within diverse contexts and countries. ICG's cross-cutting report, Exploiting Disorder: al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, launched on 14 March 2016, introduces a new programme, Modem conflict, transnational threats and non-state actors.
