PDF Ebook Psychology of Terrorism
In the current national security environment, there is little question that terrorism is among the gravest of threats. Massive resources throughout the government and private sectors have been allocated and re-allocated to the task of preventing terrorism. These efforts, however, often lack a conceptual - let alone empirically-based – foundation for understanding terrorists and their acts of violence. This void creates a serious challenge at many levels, from policy-level decisions about how a state should respond to terrorism, to individual-level decisions about whether a given person of interest, who espouses extremist ideas, truly poses a serious threat to U.S. personnel, assets, and interests.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze and synthesize what has been reported from the scientific and professional literature about the “psychology of terrorism.” This focus is not intended to suggest that the scientific discipline of psychology provides the only, or even necessarily the best, analytic framework for understanding terrorism. Like all approaches to understanding or explaining human behavior, a psychological approach has advantages and limitations. Nevertheless, as psychology is regarded as “the science of human behavior,” it seems a reasonable, and potentially productive, line of inquiry.
Although the basic question of how best to define terrorism has itself been a vexing problem, for purposes of this analysis, we are concerned generally with acts of violence (as opposed to threats or more general coercion) intentionally perpetrated on civilian non-combatants with the goal of furthering some ideological, religious or political objective. Our focus on psychological dimensions, de-emphasizes analysis of sociologically-based explanations (sometimes referred to as “root causes”) or macro-level economic and political theories. Moreover, our focus on terrorist acts de-emphasizes analysis of the psychological effects, consequences or amelioration of terrorism.
In many ways, our basic aim is rather modest. We do not anticipate identifying or discovering THE explanation for all terrorism. Rather, we hope to identify, describe, and evaluate what contribution – if any – psychological theory or research may have made to understanding terrorists and terrorism. In approaching this task, we are mindful of Walter Laqueur’s incisive conclusion based on more than a quarter century of personal research on the topic: “Many terrorisms exist, and their character has changed over time and from country to country. The endeavor to find a "general theory" of terrorism, one overall explanation of its roots, is a futile and misguided enterprise. ..Terrorism has changed over time and so have the terrorists, their motives, and the
causes of terrorism.” (Laqueur, 2003 1 ). Psychiatrist Jerrold Post makes that caveat even more directly applicable to an exploration of the psychological dimension of terrorism. He cautions that “there is a broad spectrum of terrorist groups and organizations, each of which has a different psychology, motivation and decision making structure. Indeed, one should not speak of terrorist psychology in the singular, but rather of terrorist psychologies” (Post, 2001 ). With that cautionary note, we offer the following review.
CONTENTS
Executive Summary
Introduction
Aims & methodology
Psychological approaches
to understanding violence
- Instinct Theories
Drive Theories (Frustration – Aggression)
Social Learning Theory
Cognitive Theory
Biological Factors
Raw Empirical Approaches
First generation psychological
research on terrorism
- Psychoanalytic Theory
Narcissism
Early Typologies
Contemporary psychological research on terrorism
- How and why do people enter, stay in, and leave terrorist organizations?
To what extent is psychopathology relevant for understanding or preventing terrorism?
To what extent is individual personality relevant for understanding or preventing terrorism?
To what extent are an individual’s life experiences relevant for understanding or preventing terrorism?
What is the role of ideology in terrorist behavior?
What distinguishes extremists who act violently from those who do not?
What are the vulnerabilities of terrorist groups?
How do terrorist organizations form, function, and fail?
Conclusions on the state of research
References
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PDF Ebook Psychology of Terrorism
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