“The Cold War is dead, long live the New World Disorder!” Whilst not exactly the official battle-cry for rogue-states or non-state actors, the sentiment behind this version of events is one that has become more and more a prevalent view amongst security analysts and threat assessors as they look at the international security scene at the end of the 1990s. With the absence of the paradoxical stability that the threat of all-out war between two ideologically driven alliances (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) brought with it, most analytic communities now agree that many new or older, revitalized threats have emerged to endanger the democracies of the West and that this re-emergence is categorized by a gross lack of predictability plus a great variety. Amongst the panoply of (new) threats they cite can be found: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and related know-how, which can lead to the threat of biochemical terrorism (or Catastrophic Terrorism as some have called it), as well as the threat of a general resurgence in nationalism and ethnic conflicts and the revitalization of classic territorial disputes – such as between Russia and Japan over the Kuril Islands, or the powder-keg that is the Korean peninsula.

One sub-set of this new group – the existence of which has helped justify the continued, and at times increased, funding of Western intelligence and security services – is the threat of a rise in domestic terrorism as opposed to the international variety that we were so accustomed to in the 70s and 80s. As the country most often targeted by terrorists, the US has most to fear with the rise of such a phenomenon. This is reflected by the fact that US federal funding to combat terrorism jumped to almost $10 billion this year, in comparison to 6.5 billion just the previous year. The recent changes in the nature of terrorism have brought new emphasis to bear on those not motivated in the classic political sense such as were PIRA, HAMAS or ETA. Following recent media-flooded events such as the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in March of 1995 and the Heaven’s Gate massacre, a fear has been fanned that there exists a threat of militias and millenarian cults rampaging across the US without a clear political aim but rather with the intent of satisfying their own peculiar beliefs or exacting revenge against what they see as an unjust and overly powerful government. What follows is a closer look at this joint phenomenon and an attempt to assess the veracity of current claims of impending pandemonium within the U.S.

Militias and Millenarians: a preliminary typology by Sebastian Gorka