Parochial Terrorism

• In Event: The Psychology of Terrorism and International Relations

Abstract

Today there is a widespread conception according to which the lone terrorist does not act in a vacuum and that defining him as a “lone wolf” represents a mistaken representation that hides the dynamic relationship between terrorists and their social environment and society in general, as claimed by Ramón Spaaij. In his view, terrorists acting without a definite organizational infrastructure experience social influences at various phases of the process of carrying out their attack, including the ideological inculcation that forms its basis, contact with supporters on the Net and providing signs of their beliefs in the social arena as well as their intentions to perpetrate the attack (Hamm & Spaaij, 2017; Spaaij, 2010; 2017).
The purpose of the proposed research is to track the influences of the social environment on the lone terrorist and to characterize the parochial component, with the intention of examining the role played by this environment in the radicalization process that the lone terrorist undergoes up to carrying out the violent act. For this purpose, the mechanism of social contagion of conflict will be examined together with the characteristics of the group, and specifically its collective level, might magnify the spread of the phenomenon. Attention will also be paid to the contagious component of violent behavior and the degree to which social and physical closeness contribute to that contagion, i.e., with individuals who themselves have committed such acts as models to be imitated.
The research corpus of the study is the wave of attacks that erupted in Israel starting from October 2015. In the framework of the study, data will be collected regarding 337 attackers that carried out 297 terrorist attacks up till December 2016 (which also continued after that date with varying degrees of severity), while examining their proximity to other terrorist attackers from the past and the recent wave of attacks in relation to family, social and geographical circles.
The proposed research study is unique in its attempt to assimilate a holistic view of the struggle against lone wolf terrorist attackers, while emphasizing characteristics of the social environment in which the attacker functions and its degree of vulnerability to the spread of such phenomena, The purpose is not to challenge the importance of individual personality traits in developing tendencies to commit such acts, but to integrate them into a socio-political context in the framework of which lone terrorists choose to act, which led to the formulation of the conception of Parochial Terrorism. It will be unique in examining the phenomenon of lone terrorism quantitatively, while the broad scope of events that have been identified in the framework of the wave of terror to be examined will have great importance for this type of study. The results are likely to provide explanations for the differences in the spread of lone attackers in various countries depending on the social characteristics in which that phenomenon develops.

Author

• Smadar Shaul, Moshe Dayan Center