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Ebook: Tangled Roots: Social and Psychological Factors in the Genesis of Terrorism
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The book is organized to assist readers in finding the topics that interest them the most. What do we really know about the contributing causes of terrorism? Are all forms of terrorism created equal, or are there important differences in terrorisms that one must know about to customize effective counter-strategies? Does poverty cause terrorism? Are terrorists typically crazy, vengeful, misled, or simply making an entirely sensible choice? Why would people blow themselves (and others) up? Is the “war on terrorism” even a useful idea? Is it being fought wisely, or are much better ideas staring policy makers in the face? Do leaders of targeted nations wilfully neglect the best solutions? Most of the lessons in this book concern the basic human ingredients that combust to produce violent extremism. Thus – regardless of the mutations that occur in substate terrorism – the timeless scholarship here will hopefully be somewhat helpful even to our grandchildren.
This book represents the Proceedings from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) 2005 Advanced Research Workshop on Social and Psychological Factors in the Genesis of Terrorism. The meeting that gave birth to these chapters was remarkable. The assemblage of expertise was unprecedented. Most of the chapters will stand as important, and some as major, contributions to the field. Taken as a unified whole – with its themes outlined in the introduction and its implications for the current global “war against terrorism” summarized in the Part 5– it will provide the general reader with a vivid and accessible account of what we really know about terrorism. And – without wishing to overstate the value of any one contribution to the huge task ahead – I fervently hope these Proceedings will help jumpstart the dialogue on this vital subject beyond the simplistic rhetoric of us-versus-them and into the realm of effective transnational efforts to address the underlying causes of these dangerous conflicts. I am honored and proud to have edited this book.
At the behest of the NATO, in September of 2005, a select group of world authorities on the psychology of terrorism met in the mountain village of Castelvecchio Pascoli, Italy. The participants in this meeting included experts in psychology, psychiatry, political science, public policy, international law, criminology and political philosophy. Our charge was nothing less than to brainstorm toward a comprehensive statement of the real causes of terrorism, and to attempt to craft a meaningful plan by which NATO and all concerned nations may reduce that threat.
One must be humble in the face of such a task. Terrorism is as old as humanity. Some peoples in the world have faced terrorist threats for decades, receiving a scant gurgle of attention from the scholarly community. However—probably because of the unipolarity of the post-Cold War world and the posture of the United States as the only indisputable superpower—since the terrible events of September 11, 2001 a torrent of attention has been lavished on the subject of terrorism. Innumerable meetings, seminars, conferences and colloquia have been conducted addressing the topic. Thinkers of every disciplinary orientation, political stripe, and level of expertise have published thousands of thought pieces intending to explain the phenomenon of terrorism.
Yet there is a problem. Only a tiny proportion of this great outpouring of opinion has been based on legitimate empirical study. For example, of 1535 scholarly papers published on the subject of terrorism between 2000 and 2004, only 121 had the word “data” in their abstracts and a careful review reveals that genuine new data was reported in less than 10% of that subgroup. Rigorous methods of social science research have been largely neglected in the rush to punditry. As a result, the war against violent extremism is being conducted like a war on cancer that ignores the availability of the microscope.
One afternoon in Los Angeles, I spoke with Sarnoff Mednick—Director of the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Dr. Mednick has been contributing to advances in international social science for at least four decades. He is a world-renowned authority on criminal behavior and its roots. We agreed that (1) terrorism represents a grave threat to the modern world and (2) the response to vi terrorism is largely flying blind. Absent serious study by social scientists, those threatened by terrorism have been crafting policies based upon highly unscientific and sometimes grossly biased best guesses about what causes the problem and what will work to reduce the problem. Dr. Mednick has worked with NATO before. He has experience with and faith in their open-mindedness. He deserves the credit for an inspiration that day: let's ask NATO to support a different kind of meeting, a meeting to examine what we really know about the causes of terrorism, what we need to know, and how that knowledge might guide policy to reduce the threat. We asked, and NATO's Security Through Science Programme generously granted our request. They supported our extraordinary Advanced Research Workshop on Social and Psychological Factors in the Genesis of Terrorism. These Proceedings are the result.
The book is organized to assist readers in finding the topics that interest them the most. What do we really know about the contributing causes of terrorism? Are all forms of terrorism created equal, or are there important differences in terrorisms that one must know about to customize effective counter-strategies? Does poverty cause terrorism? Are terrorists typically crazy, vengeful, misled, or simply making an entirely sensible choice? Why would people blow themselves (and others) up? Is the “war on terrorism” even a useful idea? Is it being fought wisely, or are much better ideas staring policy makers in the face? Do leaders of targeted nations willfully neglect the best solutions?
We truly hoped to address terrorism, broadly considered. But the historical context of this meeting (and perhaps a semi-conscious concern about a possible impending clash of civilizations) led to a disproportionate attention to substate terrorism in general and to Islamist extremist terrorism in particular. This should not be taken to imply any position regarding Islamist movements–far less a critique of any religion. It is simply that, at long last, an explosion of serious empirical terrorism research has occurred, chiefly provoked by the explosions of 9/11. So, just as Marxist/anarchist terrorism dominated the news and the scholarship of the 1970s, Islamist-related violence is the terrorism de jour.
Yet most of lessons in this book concern the basic human ingredients that combust to produce violent extremism. Thus–regardless of the mutations that occur in substate terrorism–the timeless scholarship here will hopefully be somewhat helpful even to our grandchildren. We might as well become expert at managing it, in all its protean manifestations, for terrorism is here to stay.
Jeff Victoroff, Los Angeles, 2006
Reviewing key results from the recent Campbell Collaboration on Counterterrorism Research (as well as other contributions to the scholarly literature), this paper will examine the knowledge claims, supporting data and underlying assumptions of recent scholarship on terrorism. Throughout the intent is to explore which data, what measurements and which statistical analyses would increase our level of confidence in what we “know.”
This article takes a look at the availability of data on terrorism and discusses the limitations that they impose of the theoretical development of terrorism research. The post-911 days have seen increased importance being placed on terrorism as a significant area of scholarly inquiry. The sheer volume of published literature has been nothing less than breathtaking. Yet, the level of publicly available data on terrorism has not kept pace with the scientific needs of testing hypotheses. After providing a brief survey of major strands of theories, this paper proposes a new look at the needs of collecting open source, publicly available data on terrorism.
This paper offers a critical assessment of the argument that the terrorism we confront today is entirely new. It analyzes the assumptions behind the “new” terrorism view point, questions its usefulness as an explanation of the threat, and assesses the negative implications of its policy recommendations. My conclusion is that the knowledge we have of the psychology of past terrorism may be limited, but it is by no means obsolete. Instead we should integrate and build on our accumulated research findings in order to understand the present and the future.
The collection of empirical data is essential to an understanding of a phenomenon. However, data collection needs to be guided by theoretical analysis. In this talk I examine two distinct psychological approaches to terrorism that view it as a “syndrome” versus a “tool”. The syndrome perspective assumes that terrorism is a psychologically meaningful entity, i.e. that terrorists are characterized by a specific set of traits that distinguishes them from non terrorists, and that terrorism as a phenomenon has a definite set of root causes (such as poverty, or oppression). The tool perspective (based on goal-systems theory) assumes that terrorism is a means that any social agent (individuals, states, non state agents) could use as a tactic in real or imagined conflict. The employment and the relinquishment of terrorism could be understood in terms of the general dynamics that govern the use of any means toward goal attainment. These two psychological perspectives on terrorism have divergent implications for the kind of data one would collect to further the understanding of this phenomenon, and counteracting it.
This paper raises a series of issues relating to how we might understand and respond to developments both in terrorism and in terrorism research. While the events of 9/11 have marked a critical turning point in the establishment of a strong sense of momentum in research efforts, it may be premature to support a call for the establishment of terrorism studies as a distinct discipline. Terrorism remains a multidisciplinary subject and, in this respect, it is important that debate ensues both within and between disciplines in terms of ascertaining the relevance of individual disciplines, and the disciplinary boundaries that exist between different perspectives. The author presents a discussion of some issues emerging from psychological perspectives on terrorism, and raises the need to consider the behavior of the State in models of non-State terrorism.
The implications of terror management theory (TMT) for understanding both how people react to terrorist attacks and what motivates people to support terrorist violence and extreme military solutions to the problem of terrorism are discussed. TMT is a general theory of human motivation, behavior, and culture that posits that people are strongly motivated to maintain faith in their cultural worldviews and high levels of self-esteem because of the role these psychological structures play in protecting them from deeply rooted fears of death and vulnerability that are inherent in the human condition. Research investigating the effect of subtle reminders of death on support for martyrdom activities, extreme military interventions, political leaders that emphasize the superiority of the ingroup, and the restriction of civil liberties is reviewed, followed by a consideration of implications of the theory for reducing the ongoing conflict that breeds both terrorist violence and extreme military interventions. Emphasis is placed on the common psychological forces that promote escalation of hostilities on all sides of the current conflict.
Criminologists have long argued that crime is concentrated into “hot spots” at various levels of spatial aggregation and that these hot spots tend to be relatively stable over time. In this paper, we ask if terrorism incidents are also concentrated in a relatively small number of cross-national hot spots and whether that concentration has remained stable over time. Using semi-parametric trajectory analysis, we examine a newly created Global Terrorism Database that includes more than 70,000 domestic and international terrorism incidents for all countries from 1970 to 1997. Based on this trajectory analysis, we divide the nations of the world into four terrorism trajectories. We find considerable evidence for concentration of terrorist events at the national level. For example, the two group trajectories in the data with the fewest cases included 88% of the world's countries but only 25% of all terrorist incidents. By contrast, the fourth trajectory included only 8% of all countries, but 67% of all incidents between 1970 and 1997. There was also considerable, but not total, support for the conclusion that terrorism levels in these countries remained stable over time. In support, three of the four trajectories changed relatively little over the 28 years spanned by the data. However, the fourth trajectory, which included by far the largest number of events, did show a fair amount of convergence with the other three trajectories during the second half of the period. Rapidly rising levels of terrorist strikes in a given country could indicate substantial and prolonged risk of high levels of terrorism in the future.
For almost three decades, economists have applied empirical and theoretical tools to investigate the effectiveness of antiterrorism actions – e.g., the installation of metal detectors and the launch of retaliatory raids. Economic methods have also been applied to gauge the economic consequences of terrorism on economic sectors and the economy as a whole. The current study explains how economic methods and the application of game theory have provided novel counterterrorism insights, not gleaned from other approaches. The study also speculates how neuroeconomics may further inform policymakers on thwarting terrorism.
Essentially what I will do is to analyze from a comparative perspective the social support of three terrorist/ guerrilla movements: The IRA, the ETA and the HESBOLLAH. I will use the concept of the radical community to show that under certain circumstances segments of the population in question are transforming themselves into traditional communities which develop a solidarity with the terrorists which it is very difficult do break up by force. The paper will study the conditions under which this kind of transformation is likely to occur, the specific traits of the radical communities and their relationship to the violent groups, and finally the up and downs of this relationship in time. A final section will treat the question what is to be done with this kind of tightly fixed unions between the terrorists and their social backing.
The paper reviews recent literature on the social backgrounds of terrorists and on cross-country analyses of economic causes of terrorism and focuses on public opinion polls concerning support for political violence and suicide terrorism. The existing literature does not show any clear pattern regarding the connection between terrorism and poverty. Studies that refer to economic motivations of terrorists are mostly based on anecdotal evidence, while studies based on systematic quantitative or qualitative analyses, such as cross-country comparisons, analyses of the militant organizations' publications, or interviews, tend to show that terrorism is not correlated with poverty. Scholars find that public support for terrorism has an impact on the intensity of terrorist acts. Polls among Palestinians conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research between 2001 and 2005 and the results of the Pew Global Attitudes Survey from 2002 in five Muslim countries show no evidence that those who are impoverished and uneducated tend to support militant activities to a larger extent than their more affluent and better-educated compatriots. Systematic, comparative and evidence-based research is needed to explain the differences among individual Muslim countries and to understand who does and who does not support politically motivated violence and under what circumstances.
This research note explores aspects of the demand for terrorism using data from the Pew Institute. With these data from 7,849 adult respondents within 14 Muslim countries, we explore who supports for terrorism. We find that females, younger persons, and those who believe Islam is under threat are more likely to support terrorism. Very poor respondents are less likely to support terrorism and those who believe that religious leaders should play a larger role in politics are more likely to support terrorism, all else constant. Because these effects vary throughout the countries studies, we argue that interventions must be highly tailored, using detailed demographic and psychographic data.
Since the late 1960s terrorism perpetrated by ETA and the IRA has constantly targeted European liberal democracies such as Spain and the United Kingdom. Both organizations, which are part of what Professor David Rapoport has called the third wave of modern terrorism, have espoused an ethno-nationalist ideology on the basis of which they have justified indiscriminate and intense campaigns of killings for decades. This paper will analyze the motivations of those individuals who at same stage were part of these terrorist organizations, groups which have been responsible for the highest level of deaths in European liberal democracies in the last forty years. Based on extensive in-depth and taped semi-structured interviews of both ETA and IRA activists carried out by the authors, the presentation will analyse the importance that social, psychological, political and other factors had in their decisions to join. The authors will examine how those who joined ETA and the IRA shared some common characteristics while differing in others. Whereas most of those who joined ETA did regard themselves as nationalists when they entered the organization, such a strong feeling was not always present in the men and women who approached the IRA. Both organizations did recruit young activists who shared the common belief that violence was useful and would help them to advance their objectives. The fulfillment of social expectations and the reinforcement of a social identity, together with a marked hatred towards the targets of their violence, were also evident in both groups of terrorists. In short, the paper will look at why individuals joined the most prominent ethno-nationalist terrorist organizations in Europe and why they opted for the use of terrorism.
Since the late 1960s terrorism perpetrated by ETA and the IRA has constantly targeted European liberal democracies such as Spain and the United Kingdom. Both organizations, which are part of what Professor David Rapoport has called the third wave of modern terrorism, have espoused an ethno-nationalist ideology on the basis of which they have justified indiscriminate and intense campaigns of killings for decades. This paper will analyze the motivations of those individuals who at same stage were part of these terrorist organizations, groups which have been responsible for the highest level of deaths in European liberal democracies in the last forty years. Based on extensive in-depth and taped semi-structured interviews of both ETA and IRA activists carried out by the authors, the presentation will analyze the importance that social, psychological, political and other factors had in their decisions to join. The authors will examine how those who joined ETA and the IRA shared some common characteristics while differing in others. Whereas most of those who joined ETA did regard themselves as nationalists when they entered the organization, such a strong feeling was not always present in the men and women who approached the IRA. Both organizations did recruit young activists who shared the common belief that violence was useful and would help them to advance their objectives. The fulfillment of social expectations and the reinforcement of a social identity, together with a marked hatred towards the targets of their violence, were also evident in both groups of terrorists. In short, the paper will look at why individuals joined the most prominent ethno-nationalist terrorist organizations in Europe and why they opted for the use of terrorism.
Claims abound regarding the presumed motivations, temperaments, and cognitive patterns of terrorists and of those who support terrorism. Very few of these claims have been tested empirically. We attempted to test several previously proposed hypotheses using more rigorous methods. First, is sympathy for terrorism associated with emotional distress, and especially with conflict-trauma-related distress? Second, is sympathy for terrorism associated with perceived oppression? Third, does sympathy for terrorism correlate with the general trait of aggressivity? Fourth, recognizing the robust evidence that both aggression and chronic stress are associated with neuroendocrine changes, do individuals with different neuroendocrine status exhibit different degrees of sympathy for terrorism? Preliminary results will be discussed.
Work conducted on behaviour in terrorist hostage taking incidents is reviewed in order to highlight areas for future research. Both terrorist and hostage behaviour are highly structured and conform to predictable 'scripts' with role-rule consistencies. Areas where research has the potential to contribute to the peaceful resolution of hostage taking incidents are identified.
Up until recently the terrorist threat has not been a subject of serious psychological research. While a fair amount of work has recently been devoted to the psychological and psychiatric consequences of acts of terrorism among direct victims and their family members, much less attention has been given to the perception of the terrorist threat by indirect victims (those who may be exposed to acts of terrorism via the mass media). In the present study we dealt with perception of the radioactive threat. A special questionnaire was designed for this purpose–The Questionnaire of the Terrorist Threat (QTT). This instrument is based on the notion that the perception of terrorist threat can be analyzed from the point of view of three components, dissimilar in their psychological content: cognitive, emotional and behavioral. The QTT is intended to evaluate the content and structure of an individual's awareness of both objective and subjective stressful factors experienced after modern terrorist acts. The basic psychometric properties and factor structure of the QTT are reported in a sample of 387 subjects
1- Violence is not a monolithic phenomenon but a complex one, a dialectic between the victim and the victimizer.
2- Phenomenological analysis helps in describing this intersubjective experience in a given situation in the real world, namely the Muslim World.
3- The initiation of violence. Who is against whom? Can spiral violence be broken?
4- Repressive violence and liberating violence. Can violence be spared without changing the situation and the psychology of violence?
5- Is non-violent struggle a third term in the dialectics between violence and non-violence? The importance of Dialogue.
6- Religions and cultures as political ideologies in traditional societies, used as a double weapon for oppression or liberation.
7- A universal code of ethics combining human rights and peoples rights, a common agenda for the future, can be bring peace with honor in equal partnership and mutual recognition.
Suicidal terrorism is fast becoming one of the most pestilent global afflictions of the 21rst century. As a terror tactic it is one of the most lethal. Strategically it functions as a relatively cheap and effective means of upsetting the political, economic and military situation of a region and has become one of the major threats to peacekeeping and peace-making efforts. Yet as prevalence rates and death tolls from suicidal attacks increase, policy makers are still working in the dark trying to find the most effective policy responses to the emergence of this new and poorly understood security threat. Currently there is an extremely small empirical research database on which policy-makers may base their understanding of the genesis of suicidal terrorism in order to work toward its prevention and eradication. Comprehending this growing threat and learning to combat it effectively on both the local and international level is extremely relevant to current public policies aimed at promoting peace and stability. This paper briefly discusses the background of modern day suicide terrorism, its migration around the world, and the tendency of modern day terror groups to embrace it as a tactic. Drawing from field research in four distinct world regions
I am indebted to Mia Bloom for coining this phrase that she also uses as the title for her book Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, Columbia University Press, 2005. As far as the history of suicide terrorism, suicide bombing as a strategic tactic is not a new phenomenon. In recent history it appeared in the fifties in Vietnam in the form of bicycle bombers who exploded themselves in cafes killing enemy occupiers who frequented them. (This piece of history related from French counterterrorism expert Francois Gere, personal communication 2005). Looking back into the ancient past, many cite the scriptural account of Sampson as one of the first suicide terrorists who when blinded and chained to pillars decided to use his great strength to pull the columns down, collapsing the building upon himself and those surrounding him. Similarly some experts recall the Muslim Assassins and Jewish Sicari as the first suicide terrorists as both groups carried out assassination missions that were nearly always suicidal for the person carrying it out. Pakistani warriors in ancient times also were known to run underneath elephants carrying advancing troops to slit the bellies of the warring beast bringing them falling down upon themselves – killing both their enemy and themselves in the process.
