CORRELATES OF VIOLENT POLITICAL EXTREMISM IN THE UNITED STATES*

Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual‐level political extremism. Instead, researchers focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data set, we test whether variables derived from prominent criminological theories are helpful in distinguishing between nonviolent and violent extremists. The results show that variables related to social control (lack of stable employment), social learning (radical peers), psychological perspectives (history of mental illness), and criminal record all have significant effects on participation in violent political extremism and are robust across multiple techniques for imputing missing data. At the same time, other common indicators of social control (e.g., education and marital status) and social learning perspectives (e.g., radical family members) were not significant in the multivariate models. We argue that terrorism research would benefit from including criminology insights and by considering political radicalization as a dynamic, evolving process, much as life‐course criminology treats more common forms of crime.     

"DOWN THERE ON A VISIT" SOUTHERN AFRICA TWENTYFIVE YEARS ON

Leonie Lichtenstein was born and educated in South Africa. She taught at schools and at the University of Witwatersrand and was for a period a full-time organiser for the Liberal Party in South Africa. She lived in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) from 1957–1962, where she and her husband became involved in the struggle against white minority rule. She moved with her family to England in 1962 where she was a lecturer in English at Goldsmith's College, University of London, and also active in community relations and as a governor of schools and higher education colleges.
In 1988 she returned to South Africa to give the keynote address to the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa on Literature and Politics. The present article stems from that visit. Soon after completing it, on 10 May 1989, she died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 58. She had completed a novel shortly before her death.