The Psychology of Terrorism

John G. Horgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134701568
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Terrorismus

This new edition of John Horgan's critically acclaimed book is fully revised and expanded.

The book presents a critical analysis of our existing knowledge and understanding of terrorist psychology. Despite the on-going search for a terrorist pathology, the most insightful and evidence-based research to date not only illustrates the lack of any identifiable psychopathology in terrorists, but demonstrates how frighteningly 'normal' and unremarkable in psychological terms are those who engage in terrorist activity. By producing a clearer map of the processes that impinge upon the individual terrorist, a different type of terrorist psychology emerges, one which has clearer implications for efforts at countering and disrupting violent extremism in today's world.

In this 2nd edition, Horgan further develops his approach to the arc of terrorism by delving deeper into his IED model of Involvement, Engagement and Disengagement – the three phases of terrorism experienced by every single terrorist. Drawing on new and exciting research from the past decade, with new details from interviews with terrorists ranging from al-Qaeda to left-wing revolutionaries, biographies and autobiographies of former terrorists, and insights from historic and contemporary terrorist attacks since 2005, Horgan presents a fully revised and expanded edition of his signature text.

This new edition of The Psychology of Terrorism will be essential reading for students of terrorism and political violence, and counterterrorism studies, and recommended for forensic psychology, criminology, international security and IR in general.

1 Psychological warfare

Introduction

Pick any debate on any aspect of terrorism. You can be guaranteed that whatever you choose will be shrouded in controversy, inaccuracies and so much polemic that Louise Richardson confidently announced that the only certainty about terrorism is the pejorative nature in which the word is used.¹ Wittgenstein’s aphorism “let the use of words teach you their meaning” seems applicable. While we hear of youths who terrorize senior citizens with taunts, or of young children who torture helpless animals, we are unlikely to refer to them as terrorists. This we reserve for something else.

Generally speaking, terrorism involves the use, or threat of use, of violence as a means of attempting to achieve some social or political effect. Despite the general tone of this description, this is probably the broadest level on which we can reach consensus on what terrorism is. When we go beyond this, problems tend to arise. From a psychological perspective, an important characteristic distinguishing terrorism from other kinds of crime involving murder, or violence committed for personal reasons (such as, for example, sexually motivated murder, or rape), is the political dimension to the terrorist’s behavior.

Most terrorist movements are relatively small, (semi-)clandestine collectives built on anti-establishment sociopolitical or religious ideologies. They seek to overthrow or at least destabilize a target regime, or influence it (be it a domestic or foreign-based power) by using violence or the threat thereof to exert pressure. In this sense, terrorism is instrumental in character. Very often, it seems that the goal of terrorism in the short term is simply to create widespread fear, arousal and uncertainty on a wider, more distant scale than that achieved by targeting the victim alone, thereby influencing (in the longer term) the political process and how it might normally be expected to function. The consequences of specific types of short-term actions are designed with the expectation of leading to longer-term outcomes. How terrorist movements do this, however (and whether they actually can; it is quite rare for them to achieve their objectives), is determined by a variety of factors, notably the ideology of the group, its available resources, knowledge and expertise, and a host of other factors. For most terrorist groups around the globe, the gun and the bomb serve to symbolically epitomize their struggle for freedom from their perceived oppressors.

Such popular perceptions of terrorists are often justified, but we must also face some uncomfortable facts. Those whom we call “terrorists” are not alone in the commission of acts that merit this label (assuming, of course, that the essence of terrorism is defined by the methods used by terrorists), and this is not simply the issue over who precisely has the monopoly over the use of violence. Not all violence is political in nature, but non-state groups that use violence will be guaranteed to run the risk of being labeled “terrorist.”

Throughout 2011 and 2012, we saw multiple examples of states and governments responsible for equally, and often far more, reprehensible acts of violence on scales unreachable by conventional terrorist organizations. This point is blatantly obvious, yet we choose both to derogate and to label as “terrorism” violence that appears to bubble up from below, rather than being imposed from above. This has not only been the case in so-called conventional wars, but applies to the recent extra-legal responses of several states in attempts to quell civil society protest. On December 11, 2013, a drone-fired missile strike on a convoy in Yemen resulted in the deaths of 52 people celebrating a wedding party.² It cannot be unexpected that this would lead to outrage, with onlookers considering it as just another “kind” of terrorism.

An answer to this, and another, alternative defining feature of non-state terrorism, is that for terrorists there is a distinction to be made between the immediate target of violence and terror and the overall target of terror: between the terrorist’s immediate victim (e.g. civilian bystanders) and the terrorist’s opponent (e.g. a government or ruling authority). Sometimes, terrorists bypass the symbolic intermediaries to target politicians directly, by assassination for instance, but because of this dynamic, terrorism has always been regarded as a kind of communication – a violent, immediate but essentially arbitrary means to a more distant political end. Although al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11 resulted in the deaths of almost 3,000 people, the more potent immediate and long-term rewards for those responsible for planning and organizing the attacks were the humiliation of the American government, the subsequent psychological arousal for the greater populace and, one could argue, the devastating consequences of the invasion of Iraq cynically framed in the context of efforts to quell terrorism. In any event, the immediate victims in this case may be only tenuously related to the terrorists’ opponents. When we consider al-Qaeda’s additional expectations of political destabilization and galvanization of extreme Islamic sentiment against Western interests, the allure of terrorism as a psychological strategy and psycho-political tool to otherwise disenfranchised extremists becomes apparent. It would be easy to explain Islamist terrorism exclusively as a civilization clash, but this simplifies the strategic considerations underpinning elaborate terrorist attacks, and exaggerates the role of religion that many presume to “inspire” contemporary political terrorism or to mobilize disaffected populations.

To clandestine groups seeking change, the attractiveness of terrorism as a tactical tool is appreciable. According to Friedland and Merari,³ terrorist violence is predicated on the assumptions that apparently random violence can push the agenda of the terrorist group onto an “otherwise indifferent public’s awareness,” and that, faced with the prospect of a prolonged campaign of terrorist violence, the public will eventually opt for an acceptance of the terrorists’ demands. The paradox is that the use of terrorism against a target does not ensure that the target will subsequently be willing to engage in dialogue with, or concede to, the terrorists as a result of what has just happened. The use of terrorism is littered with such paradoxes that illustrate a poor and distant relationship between short-term decision making and long-term planning. The former is a much mentioned but little understood feature of terrorism: the ability (or for some, the aspiration) to create levels of heightened arousal and sensitivity disproportionate to the actual or intended future threat posed by the terrorist. Brian Jenkins⁴ is famously cited as having stated that terrorists simply “want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” What follows from this, however, is that to retain a sufficient grip, the terrorist group must not only create but also maintain a general climate of uncertainty and psychological arousal. Maintaining this state often becomes a primary concern for terrorist organizations, even during ceasefires or broader peace processes when immediate goals become obscured. Following its bombing of the British Conservative Party conference in 1984 (in an attempt to assassinate the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher), the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) issued a statement concluding: “[R]emember we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”⁵ Of course, maintaining this potent state also plays a core role in sustaining terrorist followers; the criticism of al-Qaeda by its online supporters in 2010–2012 was that the movement’s leadership was no longer releasing messages to either its external enemies or its internal constituents.

Schmid⁶ describes a core feature of terrorism that gives it potency: a calculated exploitation of people’s emotional reactions due to the “causing of extreme anxiety of becoming a victim of [what appears to be] arbitrary violence” (emphasis mine). This is crucial to thinking about the effects of terrorism and is developed further by Friedland and Merari,⁷ who describe what they see as two predominant characteristics of terrorism: (1) a perception of the threatened and actual danger posed by terrorists that is disproportionate to the realistic threat posed by the capabilities of terrorists; and (2) a perception that terrorism has the ability to affect a set of victims far greater than those suffering from the immediate results of a violent act. The immediate aims and results of terrorist violence (intimidation, injury or death, the spreading of a general climate of uncertainty among the terrorists’ audience and target pool) are thus often secondary to the terrorists’ ultimate aims (and the hoped-for, from the terrorists’ perspective, political change) which are often espoused in the group’s ideology or aspirations.

In this sense, and adding to this list of traits, terrorism is often referred to as a form of sophisticated psychological warfare: outside of the immediate event, terrorism might be thought to reflect enhanced arousal and a sensitivity to environmental events associated with violence. For instance, children’s drawings (e.g. of bomb blasts, weapons, soldiers) illustrate this from the child’s perceptions, but presumably the children’s perspective is equally a reflection of adult concerns. In psychological terms, therefore, it is not terror per se we are dealing with, but arousal. Habituation diminishes arousal over time, so it can be a driving force for escalation of violence where there is explicit use of terrorism to bring forward attainable short-term political agendas. A poorly understood consequence of this heightened arousal is how time-sensitive and politically expedient responses to terrorist violence can lead to interventions that in time are revealed as hastily conceived and disastrously executed – often contributing little more than helping sustain support for the terrorist group if and when its members are clever enough to exploit those interventions effectively.

Despite our readiness to identify core features of what we feel constitutes terrorism, however (and, by default, not something else), and furthermore given that terrorism appears to have become a regular feature of contemporary political behavior, academic and policy-related definitions of what constitutes terrorism vary greatly. It is unfortunate that we are all too familiar with hearing the frequently overused “trite and hackneyed phrase[s]”⁸ that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot.” Indeed, even systematic and exhaustive attempts to define terrorism have not seen much success.⁹ Certainly in the context of the general description given earlier to start the discussion, the use of qualifiers – that is, statements about what is “usually” or “generally” meant by terrorism – permeates discussions of the concept, so much so as to bring into question the value of its continued usage.¹⁰ We are already now beginning to validate Richardson’s comment in the opening section of this chapter, as well as to convey several implicit assumptions about the potential and actual misuse of the term terrorism. In essence, to begin to say what “terrorists” do, for many (and not just necessarily in the eyes of the terrorists), carries within it a value judgment even before the actual description itself begins.¹¹ Certainly, if we rely solely on the criteria given earlier (the use or threat of use of violence as a means of achieving political change) as a guide to explaining what it is that we call terrorism, working definitions will never even emerge, let alone evolve. Even at a simplistic level, this is because so broad a description of what terrorism usually involves applies equally to the behavior of groups whom we generally do not want to refer to as terrorists (e.g. conventional military groupings, such as the army of a state).

Discrepancies and confusion arise when comparing different statistical indices of the frequency of terrorist violence around the globe. Different criteria exist not only for what classifies as terrorism per se, but also in terms of what kind of acts should be included in such resources. Long bef...