This book is designed to enable the reader to understand what terrorism is and, based on that understanding, to realistically assess future trends of this phenomenon. The book, written to be user-friendly for those not familiar with this unique form of political violence, putting terrorism in historical perspective, offers evaluative tools which can be applied to terrorist acts to assess the critical characteristics of what, who, why and how related to these acts in a non-pejorative fashion, including examples and case studies to facilitate this analysis. It evaluates various national and international responses to terrorism, in terms of their effectiveness and their legal ramifications, and offers predictions about future trends in terrorism based on current patterns, with graphs and statistics from the U.S. Department of State to make visualization of such patterns easier.