The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why

By Hudson, Rex A.

Description
Government Reference Publication

Excerpt
Excerpt: In the 1970s and 1980s, it was commonly assumed that terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would be counterproductive because such an act would be widely condemned. “Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead,” Brian Jenkins (1975: 15) opined. Jenkins’s premise was based on the assumption that terrorist behavior is normative, and that if they exceeded certain constraints and employed WMD they would completely alienate themselves from the public and possibly provoke swift and harsh retaliation. This assumption does seem to apply to certain secular terrorist groups. If a separatist organization such as the Provisional Irish Republic Army (PIRA) or the Basque Fatherland and Liberty (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna—ETA), for example, were to use WMD, these groups would likely isolate their constituency and undermine sources of funding and political support. When the assumptions about terrorist groups not using WMD were made in the 1970s and 1980s, most of the terrorist groups making headlines were groups with political or nationalist-separatist agenda. Those groups, with some exceptions, such as the Japanese Red Army (JRA—Rengo Sekigun), had reason not to sabotage their ethnic bases of popular support or other domestic or foreign sympathizers of their cause by using WMD.

Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: MINDSETS OF MASS DESTRUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 New Types of Post-Cold War Terrorists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 New Forms of Terrorist-Threat Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 TERMS OF ANALYSIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Defining Terrorism and Terrorists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Terrorist Group Typologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 APPROACHES TO TERRORISM ANALYSIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Multicausal Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Political Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Organizational Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 The Physiological Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Psychological Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 GENERAL HYPOTHESES OF TERRORISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Negative Identity Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Narcissistic Rage Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE TERRORIST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Terrorist Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 The Process of Joining a Terrorist Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 The Terrorist as Mentally Ill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 The Terrorist as Suicidal Fanatic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Fanatics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Suicide Terrorists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Terrorist Group Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Pressures to Conform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Pressures to Commit Acts of Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Terrorist Rationalization of Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 The Terrorist’s Ideological or Religious Perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 TERRORIST PROFILING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43