The Causes and Psychology of Terrorism

ISN: How did academic research and theory explain the causes and motives behind terrorist activities prior to the ‘war on terror’?

Lorenzo Vidino: While it is unquestionable that since the September 11, 2001 attacks there has been unprecedented growth in the quantity and quality of terrorism studies, the discipline was already well-established before that tragic event. Not unlike today, there were several competing theories and different levels of analysis borrowing from psychology, the social sciences, anthropology and other disciplines. But while there were many professional and empirically-grounded studies, it must be said that many theories were based on personal feelings, political persuasions and emotions rather than on evidence and analysis.

An important yet highly controversial debate focused on the role of education and poverty as causes of terrorism. Others linked terrorism to the inability to voice political opinions and democratically trigger political change. Several studies consistently and convincingly proved that most terrorists were not uneducated and poor and most lived in democratic societies, yet this debate, while less intense, is still alive today. It must also be said that, absent a universally accepted definition of terrorism – with many supporting the idea that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” – it was (and still is) difficult to find commonly accepted paradigms.

And what about the study of why individuals become terrorists? How has psychological research traditionally sought to explain why individuals are motivated to undertake terrorist activities?

The study of the causes of terrorism has traditionally focused on either the individual or the collective level of analysis. On both levels the psychological approach is crucially important. A debate that was largely resolved before 9/11 revolved around the mental sanity of terrorists, with overwhelming evidence supporting the position that the vast majority of terrorists are sane and, in most cases, quite intelligent individuals.

The psychological approach can be immensely useful but is very difficult to pursue, as, for obvious reasons, access to terrorists is not easy to obtain. While some scholars have conducted remarkable interviews and direct psychological analyses of terrorists, many studies seek to identify the psychology of terrorists through secondary sources such as court documents, journalistic investigations, and intelligence reports.

Each of these sources has potentially damning intrinsic flaws, starting with its accuracy. Even assuming these sources do provide reliable information, the facts that can be drawn from them are mostly things like a person’s age, marital status, education, and social habits. In some cases they might reveal more intimate details, such as a person’s political views, personality traits, or religious persuasion. Political scientists and psychologists can base sound analyses on such information. But, as many experts admit, these details hardly capture all the elements of the intricate and intimate psychological processes that cause a person to become a terrorist. Direct accounts provided by terrorists or former terrorists could potentially provide more insight into these dynamics, yet they are few and far between. For various reasons, very few scholars have been able to conduct interviews with individuals who have undergone the radicalization process. A handful of former terrorists of different political persuasions has published memoirs, in some cases providing interesting insights into how the individuals radicalized. Yet most of the facts revealed in these autobiographical sketches are difficult to verify and some of them have been directly challenged. The problem therefore seems to be twofold. First, extensive information is available only on a relatively small number of terrorists. This limitation is seemingly inescapable due mostly to privacy laws and the difficulties involved in accessing the relevant data. Therefore, studies of large samples of individuals, while useful in finding commonalities and tracing profiles, are unlikely, at least at this point in time, to yield deep insights into the radicalization process.

What has changed since 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’? Have we seen an increase in attempts to offer a more novel explanation of the causes and psychology of terrorism?

The events of 9/11 have triggered a surge in terrorism studies and this has unquestionably brought new insights. For starters, given the roots of the attacks, much of the analysis has shifted to religiously motivated terrorism. With some notable exceptions (such as Mark Juergensmeyer’s seminal Terror in the Mind of God), Western academics had focused on forms of terrorism driven by nationalist or purely political causes and relegated religiously motivated terrorism to a secondary position, possibly because that kind of terrorism had surfaced in the West with less intensity and frequency than other forms. Scholars began wondering about the peculiarity of religiously motivated terrorism and, in some cases in particular, about its links to Islamic culture and theology.

At the same time there has been an interesting shift among large sections of the academic community to the individual level of analysis of the causes of terrorism. While macro-level theories are still very much valid and debated, a significant amount of attention has been devoted to what has commonly been referred to as radicalization – the real buzz-word of the last ten years in the counter-terrorism field.

Yet few issues have proven more divisive and controversial among experts, both within and outside government, than trying to identify the reasons that drive people to embrace radical views and then to act on them in violent ways. As a consequence, and absent reliable supporting evidence, theories about radicalization abound. Some focus on structural factors such as political tensions and cultural cleavages, sometimes referred to as the root causes of radicalization. Others emphasize personal factors, such as the shock of a life-changing event or the influence of a mentor.

But a consensus seems to be forming which accepts that a simple causation-based approach is incorrect and that, on the contrary, it is the complex interaction of various structural and personal factors that leads people to radicalize by embracing a certain ideology. For example, the reasons that drive a London-born, university-educated and successful young man to embrace al Qaeda’s ideology are probably quite different from those that drive an illiterate boy from a famished village in rural Somalia. Yet both individuals could end up embracing the same cause and conducting a terrorist operation together. It is increasingly obvious to researchers that a one-size-fits-all explanation makes little sense.

Despite this positive development there are still major problems and flaws in how the individual causes of terrorism are studied. As mentioned above, conducting in-depth interviews and background research on terrorists is, when possible, very useful. But even those data do not tell us why individuals who are likely to have experienced similar frustrations and feelings have not radicalized. In other words, if 100 individuals are in similar predicaments we tend to study the one who became a terrorist. But it would be equally important to study why the other 99 did not become terrorists—and this study would have practical policy relevance. Of course, the challenge of conducting this kind of study is enormous.

To what extent are we still reliant upon ‘traditional’ explanations of terrorist activities? Are the likes of Abrahams, Krueger and Sageman still as important to the study of terrorism?

As in other disciplines, current scholarship can confirm or completely negate previous work, but for the most part it builds on it. Moreover, terrorism is not a static phenomenon and is changing at unprecedented speed, largely due to the pace of technological developments and globalization. It goes without saying that certain theories elaborated for local groups in the 19th century do not apply to modern transnational and technologically savvy groups like al Qaeda. Yet many theories do still apply and it is impossible to study contemporary terrorism without a foundation in them.

Are the more traditional explanations of terrorism sufficient for understanding the contemporary threat posed by transnational terrorist organizations and lone wolves such as Anders Breivik? Are less conventional attempts at explaining the motives behind terrorism worth pursuing?

One of the most lively post-9/11 debates in the field was whether al Qaeda’s and, more generally, jihadist terrorism constituted a new kind of terrorism, compared to the “old terrorism” of the IRA, the Red Brigades, the Palestinian groups and so on. Many, starting with Walter Laqueur, argued that al-Qaeda and jihadist terrorism was completely different from past forms because it was millenarian, it operated globally, it sought and could achieve carnage and destruction on an unprecedented scale, and could not be confronted with negotiations. Its religious motivation also gave it an unprecedented level of fanaticism that authorized its adherents to kill as many people as possible, while globalization and technologies previously unavailable terrorists made it possible for them to do so.

Many argued, however, that similar developments had been experienced in the past. Transnational, informal groups had always existed, starting with the anarchist movements of the 19th century. Technological developments have always allowed the next generation of terrorists to be more lethal than previous ones. And there have always been groups, whether religiously motivated or not, that sought wanton destruction.

A similar analysis has been applied to the phenomenon of lone wolves. The attacks carried out by Breivik (or, on a smaller scale, by other individual terrorists such as Mohammed Merah in Toulouse) challenge many of the assumptions about terrorism, such as the focus on groups and organizations. But, once again, today’s lone wolves are hardly a novelty, as examples of individual terrorists date back centuries (once again the anarchists of 19th and early-20th centuries provide examples of the phenomenon).

In a nutshell, there is no question that blindly applying old models to the continuously evolving phenomenon of terrorism is a flawed exercise. But history and “traditional” scholarship are still a valuable (and often under-appreciated) aide.

Dr Lorenzo Vidino is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich. His latest book is The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Columbia University Press, 2010).