IACSP Homeland Security Bookshelf V29N1 2024

Counterterrorism & Homeland Security Bookshelf 

Reviewed by Dr. Joshua Sinai 

The column capsule reviews eight books.  

Richard J. Chasdi, Corporate Security Surveillance: An Assessment of Host Country Vulnerability to Terrorism (Cham, Switzerland, Springer, 2024), xxiv, 448 pages., $129.99 [Hardcover], ISBN: 978-3-0313-9549-9.

This is an empirically-based comprehensive handbook that provides security practitioners with a useful tool kit to assess the terrorist risk environments that challenge corporations’ operations in highly volatile countries. The author’s framework is applied to five country case studies; Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa and Thailand. These countries experience a high rate of terrorist and organized criminal threats, but they were selected because they host a large number of foreign corporations, thus making this study of special interest to Western security practitioners in particular. The author’s quantitative and qualitative scoring framework, which he terms the Terrorist Assault Business Vulnerability Index (TABVI), is applied to examine the terrorism risk facing the five country in terms of the local terrorist groups’ targeting preferences, companies’ vulnerabilities, and strategic responses that are required to mitigate the threats challenging them. In some of these countries, the author points out, such as Brazil and Mexico, organized criminal groups present a more lethal risk than do terrorist groups, so the distincti...