This book is a collection of essays, polemics and reportage on ISIS, spanning the four year period from its spectacular ascendancy in late 2014 to its no less spectacular demise in early 2018. Although the pieces are unmistakably grounded in my own judgments and opinions, they are informed by a broader scholarly knowledge about deviance, defection, terrorism and violence.

In my day-job I work as a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Kent. While it's a huge privilege to be paid to teach and do research on a subject that is richly dark, human and endlessly fascinating, one of the downsides is that I have to produce peer-reviewed articles for academic journals that few people read. These articles not only take months or even years to research and write; they also take months or even years to see the light of day, given the rigmarole of the peer-review process. Patience may well be a virtue, but it's not one that I possess. This is why I find ideas-based journalism so appealing: not just because many more people are likely to read it than an academic journal article, but because it's so wonderfully instantaneous. You write your piece and within a few days or weeks it's out there— to be read, praised, tweeted or, more often, trashed, or still more likely, half-read, misunderstood or just ignored.

No doubt some academics, especially those who are instinctively skeptical of any public discourse that is not rooted in hard data, will turn their noses up at the pieces collected in this volume. But that's fine with me. These pieces are aimed at a wider, and not so prickly, audience.

The essays are organized into three thematic sections and vary in length and purpose: some take the form of 1000-word op-eds, whereas others are longer and more ruminative in tone and scope. A few are pieces of reportage. Some were commissioned, but most were not and were written out of an unshakeable urge to correct some misapprehension or myth, as I saw it at the time, or to amplify a point or argument that I needed to make. I don't know where this urge comes from. Obviously it's not very endearing: the desire to correct, the urge to be heard. And obviously I need to get out more.