Typologies of Terrorist Involvement: furthering our knowledge of what it means to be “involved in terrorism”.

• In Event: Typologies of Terrorist Involvement: Furthering our Knowledge of “Involved in Terrorism”

Abstract

Little is known about what precisely people do on a day-to-day basis once they are involved in a terrorist organization. Outside of the immediate behavioral precursors to major terrorist operations we therefore know little of what involvement in terrorism actually entails. Achieving a more sophisticated understanding of what involvement in terrorist represents may be a critical first step in informing decisions about how we could distinguish one ‘kind’ of terrorist from another. This has important implications for decisions regarding the risk assessment, sentencing, and potential release of terrorist offenders. This multi-disciplinary roundtable aims to further our understanding of involvement in terrorism by outlining several recent strands of research aimed at understanding involvement in terrorism. This roundtable will outline research completed by the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies that developed a dataset encompassing all individuals associated with the Global Jihadist Movement in the United States and Europe. Research recently completed by Dr. Lemieux that explores the factors that influence the likelihood that an individual would be willing to use, or justify the use of, terrorism will also be presented. Finally Dr. Karl Roberts will discuss the use of small group psychology for risk assessment of extremist groups.

Authors

• John Horgan, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

• Neil Shortland, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

• Shaun Walsh, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

• Anthony Lemieux, Georgia State University

• Karl Roberts, University of Massachusetts, Lowell / Macquarie University, Sydney