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Abstract
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Scholarly terrorism research has historically manifested most frequently as the psychological study of radicalization processes (Horgan, 2005; Kruglanski et al., 2014) and terrorist group dynamics by political scientists (Abrahms, 2012; Schmid & Jongman, 1988). Conversely, although there are important exceptions (e.g., Hamm, 1993; Smith, 1994), most criminological research on terrorism and violent extremism has been conducted more recently, increasing after the coordinated terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The dearth of criminological attention to terrorism in the past, particularly by homicide researchers, is an important gap for several reasons.
First, there are many apparent similarities between terrorism and crime. Sutherland (1947) famously wrote that criminology includes within its scope "the study of the making of laws, the breaking laws, and reactions to the breaking of laws" (p. 1)--which would seem to unambiguously locate terrorism within the field of criminology. Among our contemporaries, this position has also been made forcefully by Clarke and Newman (2006), who state simply that "[t]errorism is a form of crime in all essential respects" (p. i). We concur. Prior research has found that terrorism and crime have limited and common offender pools (i.e., young males; DeLisi, Neppl, Lohman, Vaughn, & Shook, 2013; Gendreau, Little, & Goggin, 1996), have deleterious effects on social trust and community cohesion (Anderson, 2000; Kirk & Matsuda, 2011), and are social constructions which derive meaning from human interactions all the while reproducing rules and norms (LaFree & Dugan, 2004). But it is important to recognize that there are also differences between terrorism and ordinary crime. Perhaps most obviously, traditional criminals are generally driven by personal gain and selfishness, while terrorism is most often motivated by the furtherance of political causes and even altruism (Crenshaw & Horowitz, 1983; LaFree, Dugan, & Miller, 2015). And though common criminals usually try to avoid detection, terrorists commit crimes unabashedly and often seek the largest audiences possible (Kydd & Walter, 2006; Pape, 2005), ostensibly justified by their perceived contributions to the greater good (Hoffman, 1998; Jaśko, LaFree, & Kruglanski, 2016; McCauley & Moskalenko, 2011).
A second reason why we regard the lack of criminological terrorism research as unfortunate is that homicide researchers actually have a long history of examining rare forms of lethal violence, and have explicitly noted the importance of considering...
Language: en |