Non-involvement in terrorist violence: Understanding the most common radicalisation outcome

Understanding why people become involved in terrorist violence been a focus of academic enquiry for many decades. In many ways, this pursuit has been guided by a question which informs almost every study of undesirable behaviour. What sets certain people apart? Whilst numerous radicalization models propose routes and pathways to perpetration, they also come with an important caveat. For those who undergo a process of radicalization, the vast majority will never come to be involved in the planning, perpetration or commissioning of terrorist violence. Most individuals who become radicalized will occupy mundane roles, ranging from posting extremist ideological materials online to controlling the finances or recruitment. Indeed, some may just ‘hang on’ for a few years before eventually tethering off. However, despite the heavy representation in the radicalized population of extremist who do not become involved in terrorist violence, the majority of radicalization research is conducted with the smaller sub-population who do become involved in such attacks. This is a problem for a number of reasons. As well as masking discrepancies in the population at large, this overemphasis on the dependent variable ultimately limits our knowledge of potential protective factors that may keep those who radicalize from perpetrating terrorist attacks. In the study of other behavioural outcomes such as disease and disorder, such knowledge gaps are addressed through disaggregation based on “outcome” status. Simply put, those with a similar disease but different outcome are compared to observe the distribution of different determinants (i.e. risk factors) on the outcome of interest. This presentation will detail the methods and preliminary findings of a novel, cross-case comparison study which sought to use this approach. Radicalized individuals across Europe and North America (n = 200) who occupied a spectrum of roles in extremist organizations were included in the study, and their trajectories were compared. By selecting cases based on their “outcome status” (i.e. involved in terrorist violence or not), the goal of the current project was to determine the representativeness of a number of theory-driven individual, structural and group level variables in these sub-populations using primary and secondary sources. Efforts to reduce bias and confounding will be discussed alongside the preliminary findings of this three-year project.