The Buccinasco Pentiti: A Unique Case Study of Radicalization

Recently many scholars have focused their attention on the dynamics of radicalization, de-radicalization, and disengagement, yet most studies are based on indirect and/or data which is difficult to verify. An exception comes from Italy, where authorities have recently benefited from the insights of two former members of an al Qaeda-affiliated Tunisian network. The two have voluntarily described to authorities the process and factors that led them to their radicalization and encouraged them to abondon the network. Based on thousands of pages of their unpublished confessions, the article provides a case study of radicalization that is rich in detail and uniquely reliable.     

理解恐怖分子的行为激进化:一个整合性分析框架

当前在对恐怖分子激进化的分析中存在“激进化是否遵循线性的发展道路”和“思想激进化与行为激进化的区分是否必要”的争议,导致对激进化的理解存在困惑。在坚持非线性组织方式、思想与行为二分法的基础上,构建了一个分析恐怖分子行为激进化的整合性分析框架,即对经验研究中的推动、拉动和中介因素进行了区分和统合。推动因素表现为个体或群体的失控、焦虑、羞辱、不满、怨恨等负面情绪,拉动因素表现为恐怖组织提供的“圣战”、重建“哈里发国”、“末日决战”等极端主义意识形态;而人际网络、虚拟网络与大众传媒在行为激进化中发挥着中介因素的作用。理解恐怖分子的行为激进化具有一定的理论与现实意义。就理论意义而言,可以借此探究恐怖主义的产生原因。就现实意义而言,从负面情绪、意识形态、网络与大众传媒三个方面对恐怖主义进行整合性治理,能提高恐怖主义全球治理的有效性。     

The Disengagement of Indonesian Jihadists: Understanding the Pathways

While much research has been conducted on the radicalization of Muslim militants from Jemaah Islamiyah, its spinoffs, and splinter factions; the historical roots of Indonesian radical movements; and their ideological underpinnings, far less analysis has centered on how and why individual militants may come to disengage from violence. Disengagement is defined as a gradual process through which a member of a terror group, radical movement, gang, or cult comes to reject the use of terror methods in pursuit of their goals. Utilizing original fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2014, with fifty current and former members of Islamist extremist groups in Indonesia, this article will unpack the patterns, pathways, religious considerations, and psychological processes that propel individual militants to turn away from violence.     

Berko Anat. The Path to Paradise,the Inner World of Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers. Forward by Moshe Addad,and translated by Elizabeth Yuval

This article conceptualizes political radicalization as a dimension of increasing extremity of beliefs, feelings, and behaviors in support of intergroup conflict and violence. Across individuals, groups, and mass publics, twelve mechanisms of radicalization are distinguished. For ten of these mechanisms, radicalization occurs in a context of group identification and reaction to perceived threat to the ingroup. The variety and strength of reactive mechanisms point to the need to understand radicalization—including the extremes of terrorism—as emerging more from the dynamics of intergroup conflict than from the vicissitudes of individual psychology.     

The Homegrown Threat: State Strength,Grievance, and Domestic Terrorism

Scholars maintain that, similar to insurgency, terrorist violence is precipitated by both relative deprivation and state weakness. Yet aggrieved minority groups within a country should turn to terrorism when they are weak relative to the state rather than strong. Empirical evidence shows minority group discrimination and fragile political institutions to independently increase domestic terror attacks. But it remains unclear whether grievances drive domestic terrorism in both strong and weak states. Using data from 172 countries between 1998 and 2007, we find that for strong states the presence of minority discrimination leads to increased domestic terrorism, while for weak states the presence of minority discrimination actually leads to less domestic terrorism. Consequently, increasing state capacity may not be a panacea for antistate violence, as nonstate actors may simply change their strategy from insurgency or guerrilla warfare to terrorism. Efforts to reduce terrorist violence must focus on reducing grievance by eliminating discriminatory policies at the same time that measures to improve state capacity are enacted.     

A Battlefield of Meanings: The Struggle for Identity in the UN Debates on a Definition of International Terrorism

For nearly forty years, debates on a definition of international terrorism as part of a comprehensive convention have been preoccupying the United Nations. This article challenges conventional approaches referring to divergences in national interests and preferences, or to institutional constraints and national legal traditions, to explain why no definition has been agreed upon. It analyzes the inconclusive debates from a critical perspective and argues that the continuous search for a definition can be understood through the prism of collective identity struggles: the desire to define terrorism is not only the desire to give a precise content to terrorism and, thereby, create the identity of an Other. It is also the desire to create a collective identity, a “Self,” representing and uniting those who oppose terrorism. By applying a discursive understanding of collective identity construction to analyze the UN debates, the article elucidates how strongly the definition of terrorism hinders a common understanding among those who are opposing terrorism. Thereby, the analysis highlights that the demonization of terrorism foremost impedes a homogeneous understanding of a collective Self, ready to confront and define terrorism in the first place.     

核安全全球治理:历史、现实与挑战

核安全风险超越国界,可能跨越地区,甚至影响全球,因而核安全的治理必然是全球治理。各国对核安全风险的评估、核安全意识的养成是一个演进的过程,与此同步的是核安全全球治理。核安全全球治理经历了冷战、冷战结束和九一一事件以来的三个发展阶段,治理的主要内容随着国际安全形势的变化而调整。冷战期间的核安全全球治理主要体现为建立国际原子能机构以管理核能的和平利用,防范无核国家以发展民用核能为由发展核武器,签署和履行与核安全密切相关的国际公约、培育核安全的意识;冷战结束初期,国际原子能机构强化了保障监督能力,多边出口管制机制加强了对涉核物项出口的管控,国家间展开了实质性的核安全合作;九一一恐怖袭击之后,核安全全球治理呈现加速度的趋势,国际社会日益形成核安全共识,全球性制度建设加速,多边合作加强。经过多年努力,核安全全球治理的制度建设取得了显著成就,双边和多边国际合作得到实质性推动,但核安全全球治理仍然面临如何有效减少核材料存量、如何推动相关国家切实履行国家责任等挑战。     

Armies of God,Armies of Men: A Global Comparison of Secular and Religious Terror Organizations

This article compares the violent activity of secular and religious terror organizations. Utilizing data compiled by the Global Terrorism Database cross-referenced with secondary and primary sources regarding the degree of religious components embedded in organizations’ ideologies, it tests the violent patterns of activity carried out by organizations guided by predominantly secular, secular/religious, and religious ideologies, between the years 1970 and 2012. The findings confirm that a) religious ideology correlates with specific, more deadly, attack tactics and violent patterns; and b) the degree of religious components within terror organizational ideology should be tested along a spectrum: the more religious an organization is, the more attacks it tends to carry out, and the deadlier its attacks become.     

The Collective Nature of Lone Wolf Terrorism: Anders Behring Breivik and the Anti-Islamic Social Movement

Anders Behring Breivik, a lone wolf terrorist, killed 77 people in two terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011. This study uses framing theory from social movement studies to compare his Manifesto with the rhetoric of the anti-Islamic movement that inspired him. The anti-Islamic movement has a dual, and sometimes inconsistent, collective action framing. On the one hand, they portray Islam as an existential threat to the West and a warlike enemy; on the other, they promote peaceful and democratic opposition. The potential for radicalization is thus immanent. This case study reveals the importance of seeing lone wolf terrorists as acting from rhetoric embedded in larger social movements. It further demonstrates, in detail, the subtle and complex ways in which political narratives rejecting terrorism and political violence still end up inspiring such acts.     

The Nefarious Helping Hand: Anti-Corruption Campaigns,Social Service Provision,and Terrorism1

This article offers a novel contribution to the terrorism literature by using mathematical modeling and case studies to demonstrate how terrorist and extremist groups can utilize social service provision activities and anti-corruption campaigns instead of violent activities to gain support.The basic argument of the model is that terrorist groups will try to gain support by promising that they will be better distributors of resources than the current regime once they gain power and by promising that they will be less corrupt. However, because all organizations can freely make these promises, their words are cheap talk, and the general population should ignore them. To overcome this problem, organizations must offer a costly signal. Provision of social goods and implementation of explicit anti-corruption campaigns before taking power serves as such a signal. As the United States government and its allies widen their “war on terrorism,” they must consider the ramifications of social service provision and anti-corruption activities, which are common, effective, and potentially useful for increasing the probability of group success.     

The discourse and study of terrorism in decolonised states: the case of Pakistan

The existing literature in the terrorism field does not address the absence of terrorism scholarship in developing countries. This article focuses on this intellectual gap using the case of Pakistan. It argues that most decolonised states, including Pakistan, are yet to grasp the complexities of traditional approaches to the study of terrorism, let alone its critical dimensions. The article explores some of the prevailing conditions in developing countries, specifically decolonised states such as Pakistan, which prevent the development of a robust academic discourse on terrorism and the development of a strong field of study. It suggests that the main barriers that account for this shortfall include the state’s legitimacy deficit, a flawed education system that nurtures fictions as truth and inhibits knowledge production, the institutionalised role of conspiracy theories in national politics and the multiplicity of terrorism discourses among government and sociopolitical entities. The conclusion highlights a number of reasons that might help to explain this persistent condition and offers a few policy recommendations.     

The ghosts of state terror: knowledge,politics and terrorism studies

Employing a discourse analytic approach, this paper examines the silence on state terrorism within the broader terrorism studies literature. An analysis of this literature reveals that state terrorism is noticeable mainly for its absence as a subject of systematic academic study. Following the textual analysis, the main finding – the silence on state terrorism within terrorism studies – is subjected to both a first- and second-order critique. A first-order or immanent critique uses a discourse's internal contradictions, mistakes and misconceptions to criticise it on its own terms. In this case, the absence of state terrorism is criticised for its illogical actor-based definition of terrorism, its politically biased research focus, and its failure to acknowledge the empirical evidence of the extent and nature of state terrorism. A second-order critique entails reflecting on the broader political and ethical consequences of the representations enabled by the discourse. It is argued that the absence of state terrorism from academic discourse functions to promote particular kinds of state hegemonic projects, construct a legitimising public discourse for foreign and domestic policy, and deflect attention from the terroristic practices of states. The exposure and destabilisation of this dominant narrative also opens up critical space for the articulation of alternative and potentially emancipatory forms of knowledge and practice.     

Post-Jihadism: Libya and the Global Transformations of Armed Islamist Movements

This article analyzes the global transformations of jihadist movements towards abandoning and de-legitimizing political violence in general and terrorism in particular. It focuses on the de-radicalization process of Libya's largest armed Islamist movement: the Islamic Fighting Group. It analyzes the causes behind those transformations and outlines the necessary conditions for, and policy implications of, successful de-radicalization. The article is mainly based on primary sources, field work, and interviews with former jihadist leaders, mid-ranking commanders, grassroots activists, security and intelligence officers, and state officials.     

The Escalation of Terrorism: Microlevel Violence and Interstate Conflict

Following the 9/11 attacks, transnational terrorism is seen as a potential catalyst for interstate war. Yet, the willingness of states to fight in response to terrorist violence is puzzling, given that the damage created by terrorism is relatively marginal. This raises the question: if terrorists are so weak and create such little damage, and interstate conflicts are so costly, why are states willing to initiate seemingly ruinous wars to fight terrorist groups? This essay proposes an explanation to address this question using current theoretical and empirical research on terrorism and interstate violence. Recent work indicates that while terrorists appear weak compared to states, terrorists can wield significant coercive power in smaller geographic areas. I argue that if these areas are strategically crucial to the government, such as areas with oil wells or mineral deposits, terrorist activity may precipitously weaken states relative to their rivals. I therefore argue that even if groups are only capable of killing at low levels, terrorism may lead to macrolevel power shifts, which may contribute to interstate violence.     

Desperate times and desperate measures: false-representation and distortion of terrorism in post-9/11 superhero films

In the wake of 9/11 there has been a marked increase in depictions of terrorism in Hollywood film. This shift has been particularly significant in superhero films. This genre of films has not historically relied upon terrorist narratives, but this article highlights contemporary ideological overlaps between terrorist and superhero narratives that explain why they have been more frequently presented together in contemporary film. In particular, both rely upon what Giorgio Agamben and other scholars refer to as a “state of exceptionality” and they feature ideological categories, such as those delineated in the work of Teun Van Dijk. This article analyses these themes using the methods of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. The article finds the growing number of depictions of terrorists in superhero films problematic because they deny terrorists rationality or political consciousness. The article analyses the binarism that this creates, finding that the proliferation of terrorist narratives in superhero films ultimately is detrimental because it proliferates a shallow and misleading understanding of terrorism which can undermine popular understanding of terrorism.     

Three Theories of Religious Activism and Violence: Social Movements,Fundamentalists, and Apocalyptic Warriors

Numerous scholars have investigated religiously motivated violence, particularly in the wake of September 11, including discussions on the role of modernity in triggering religious violence, the increasing presence of religion in politics, the violence-prone nature of certain religions, and religion's correlation with ethnicity and other conflict-intensifying variables. However, religious activism and violence are not new phenomena. Few theories have been advanced that move across time and space and, broadly, seek to explain the conditions under which religion becomes involved in activism and violence. This article argues that three broad causal arguments for religious activism—social movements, fundamentalism, and apocalyptic warriors—help explain the conditions under which religiously motivated violence occurs across time and space. These three causal arguments offer a spectrum of goals within religious activism, ranging from challenging social practices and government policies, to defending specific interpretations and practices of the faith, to hastening the apocalypse. Furthermore, each of these theories proposes different ways that religion becomes involved in social, political, and religious activism and the conditions under which groups use violence to further their goals. The article concludes by suggesting countermeasures for each type of religious activism.     

The amateur revolutionaries: A reassessment of the FLQ

Although Canada has experienced a wide variety of forms of political terrorism, only the FLQ's attack on federalism has earned a lasting place in Canadian historical memory, a place achieved without attaining its goal of an independent Quebec. Using new sources, this article explains this conundrum by reassessing the effectiveness of the FLQ's campaign. It will demonstrate that the very thing that constituted the FLQ's only success ‐ its ability to project an illusion of strength sufficient to convince the federal government that a popular insurrection was developing in Quebec ‐ masked its singular failure: organizational weakness and poor strategic judgment. These prevented the FLQ from achieving its goals and were the hallmarks of its status as ‘amateur revolutionaries’.     

The political importance of labelling: terrorism and Turkey's discourse on the PKK

Labelling the ‘other’ is one of the most relevant aspects in an armed conflict context. Summarising what the opponent is in one single expression is a strong rhetorical tool in any belligerent discourse. The use of the ‘terrorist’ label assumes a particularly powerful role in such a construction. Employing Ole Wæver's layered discursive structure, this article aims to study the discursive practices and political consequences associated with the use of such labels. The political implications of using the ‘terrorist’ label in regards to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkish politics will be analysed as an illustrative case study. The period under analysis extends from April 2007 to January 2008, corresponding to the escalation of a security discourse that led to the (brief) Turkish military incursion in northern Iraq in the winter of 2007–2008. The political exposure and intense usage of the ‘terrorist’ label in this period makes it particularly ripe for understanding the political discursive context that shapes Turkey's policies towards this protracted conflict. The focus on this period also sheds light on the political reasons underlying the intractability of this conflict.     

国家认同与族群认同:以马来西亚为例

国家与族群具有不同的结构与功能,因而国家认同与族群认同的要素,特别是二者的认同基础存在较大的差异。正是这种差异决定着二者关系的基本形态。国家的公共性要求它不应该将政治政策偏向任何一个族群。族群平等是国家认同与族群认同的平衡点,否则,可能会导致政策所损害的族群对国家存在意义的质疑。马来西亚独立后,特别是20世纪70年代后,实施的正是偏向马来人的政策,从而造成非马来人对国家的不满。