西部民族地区恐怖犯罪问题初探

中国西部地区“三股势力”的恐怖活动对国家和平、安全与发展构成了严重威胁。本文从国际环境、民族宗教、经济文化等方面综述引发西部地区恐怖犯罪之根源,指出遏制、防范和打击西部地区恐怖犯罪的战略指导思想。     

A Bloodless Guerrilla Warfare: Why U.S. White Leftists Renounced Violence Against People During the 1970s

Between 1968 and the late 1970s, a significant number of U.S. white leftist groups escalated their protest to armed struggle. After experimenting briefly with violence, they opted for low-intensity armed propaganda that targeted property and avoided hurting people. By contrast, European leftist groups and anti-colonial organizations in the U.S. made extensive use of antipersonnel violence. Why did U.S. leftists eschew attacks against civilians? Scholarship does not explain this case, as it focuses either on the internal dynamics of a single group or on structural variables. Conversely, this article addresses this question through a historical reconstruction and a multilevel analysis. The research identifies the critique and ensuing de-solidarization by the radical milieu as the main factor accounting for the restraint of violence. This article demonstrates that the radical milieu censored and isolated armed groups as soon as they escalated and began to endanger human lives. Therefore, in order to safeguard the solidarity pact with their constituencies, violent fringes moderated their repertoires of action. This article employs primary sources and original interviews with militants to support this claim and to assess the relevance of three concurrent factors: the trauma generated by the “townhouse incident,” the deterrence by law enforcement, and the militants’ socio-economic background.     

Competing to Kill: Terrorist Organizations Versus Lone Wolf Terrorists

Are organizationally linked suicide attacks deadlier than those launched by lone wolf terrorists? This article elaborates a perpetrator-based distinction among suicide terrorist attacks between organizations and lone wolf terrorists, who operate in the absence of a financially or physically supportive terrorist organization. The expectation is that terrorist organizations would serve as commitment tools that increase the loyalty of suicide bombers to their missions through material and non-material incentives. Findings demonstrate that when terrorist organizations are involved in the planning and execution of suicide terrorist attacks, not only do they increase the lethality of these attacks but they also accentuate the tactical advantages of suicide terrorism. These findings suggest that despite the recent upsurge and concern about lone wolf terrorism, the lethality and security impacts of suicide terrorism continue to be driven by terrorist organizations.     

Deadlier in the U.S.? On Lone Wolves,Terrorist Groups,and Attack Lethality

Scholars, politicians, and pundits increasingly suggest lone wolf terrorists are substantial threats, but we know little about how dangerous these actors are—especially relative to other terrorist actors. How deadly are lone actor terrorists? A growing body of empirical research focuses on terrorist organizations, but similar work on lone actors is sparse. Furthermore, attempts to explicitly compare these or other types of terrorist actors are almost non-existent. This article considers theoretical arguments for why lone wolves ought to be especially lethal. However, it presents an argument for why terrorist groups should generally be more lethal. This argument is conditional upon the environment in which actors operate. Lone wolves should only be more deadly in states with especially strong counterterrorism capacity. The article uses data on terrorist attacks in fifteen developed countries, 1970–2010, to compare the lethality of terrorist acts. Around the world, attacks by organizations tend to be far more lethal than attacks by other actors. In the United States, however, lone wolves are generally the more lethal terrorist actors. This is argued to be because the robust counterterrorism capacity makes organized terrorism more difficult to accomplish.     

The Discursive Construction of Terrorist Group Identity

The media coverage of terrorist acts has been the subject of numerous scientific studies. However, the terrorist groups’ own communication perspectives have not been thoroughly researched. The following article deals with terrorist groups and their use of websites for identity building. We examine the discursive construction of terrorist group identity through critical discourse analysis (CDA). The CDA of online texts from websites of terrorist groups is based on a five macro-strategy scheme. Our sample consists of six terrorist groups, with each group of two sharing different motivations: social-revolutionary, ethno-nationalist, or religious. All the groups analyzed are listed as terrorist organizations by the European Union. The CDA of 27 terrorist websites, purposively sampled, was conducted using two coders per site. Through this analysis, the researchers draw conclusions on strategies employed by terrorist organizations in building identity and how to counter their unregulated propaganda.     

国际恐怖犯罪的特点、成因及对策

国际恐怖主义是当前国际社会所面临的主要挑战之一,它严重危害了国际社会的整体利益。尤其是近几年来,国际恐怖犯罪活动猖獗,以本.拉登为首的恐怖组织,更是制造了几起震惊世界的恐怖犯罪事件。这种特殊的犯罪形式引起了国际学术界和实务界的广泛关注。因此,研究这种犯罪的特点、成因及其处置对策具有十分重要的意义。     

?我国高校反恐问题及对策初探

当前恐怖袭击在全世界的发展呈现出多种新趋势，严重威胁各国国家和人民的利益，并且有向高校蔓延的趋势。在我国，高校校园是重要的公共场所，容易成为恐怖袭击的高风险目标，一旦在高校校园内发生恐怖袭击，其造成的危害难以估量。因此，对我国高校反恐问题的研究就显得尤为重要了，立足我国高校反恐的现实，为有效预防和处置可能到来的针对高校校园的恐怖袭击找到行之有效的应对途径，维护和谐的学习和生活环境提供有力的保障。     

严重暴力犯罪概念解析

与传统暴力犯罪相比,严重暴力犯罪已经危害公共安全,这是其本质特征。文章从"暴力犯罪"、"严重暴力犯罪"、"突发公共事件"、"恐怖袭击事件"等易混淆的概念入手,从认识层面理清各自内涵属性,提出应从行为手段与危害公共安全二者的结合来界定突发事件的性质,认为是否内含"人为恶意破坏、危害公共安全"要素是严重暴力犯罪与一般暴力犯罪的根本差别。严重暴力犯罪案件作为突发事件中性质最为严重的一种,其发生、发展的控制不能寄刑罚手段一途,须动用特别手段紧急处置。     

‘Just three Skittles in a bowl will kill you. Would you take a handful?’ Evidence,public policy and Islamist-inspired violent extremism

ABSTRACT

Saggar’s article is concerned with the use of evidence by the UK policy community to tackle Islamist-inspired terrorism. It focuses on how evidence for such terrorism is generated, interpreted and organized, in particular pinpointing the challenges of reliability and prediction facing those with responsibility for tackling terrorism and its associated causes. Counter-terrorism policy is heavily exposed to risks of bias and distortion, but it is also vulnerable to various kinds of institutional group-think and vested interests. This article scrutinizes three such aspects of counter-terrorism evidence-based policymaking. First, there are imperfections in the evidence base, mostly arising from data limitations and practical shortcomings. These include factual gaps in knowledge, difficulties in comparing evidence about Muslims with non-Muslims, methodological weaknesses and difficulties in measuring profoundly subjective feelings about alienation and grievance. Second, the scope of the problem to which policy is addressed (and the policy paradigms that are alluded to) shape the priorities placed on the evidence base. How much weight should be given to evidence about the narrative of oppression or dissent used by extremists? Background oppositional identities are extensively researched and yet policymakers may choose to concentrate instead on factors in the foreground that have to do with actual violent conspiracies. Third, important nuances in the evidence–policy nexus arise from the implicit generalizations that are held by policymakers. Evidence describing the problem of terrorism is better accompanied by an appreciation of (and perhaps evidence about) the behavioural situation of decision-makers and decision-making structures. This involves trade-offs, bargaining and accommodations to carry different constituencies, and has a bearing on the kind of evidence that is used in counter-terrorism. Saggar closes with a discussion of the above distinctions, and concludes that there is a risk of naivety in evidence-based policymaking that is not alive to the politics of radicalization and extremism.