What makes terrorists tick

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Shortly after the report came out, I was invited to meet with DOD personnel, and asked what I thought needed to be done to improve the risk assessment of terrorism. I told them that a critical review that placed the risk assessment of terrorism into the broader context of the risk assessment of violence more generally was the first step needed to put the study of terrorism on a solid empirical basis.

The second step was to convene a conference of leading researchers on terrorism and on risk assessment, along with operational personnel from many government agencies, to critique that review. The DOD agreed, and asked me to conduct the review. The meeting to critique it was held at the Law School last May.

You identify challenges in even defining what aspects of terrorism researchers should aim to assess — terrorism as a whole, specific types of terrorism, phases in the process of becoming a terrorist, or specific roles in terrorist activity be it courier or suicide bomber, for example. What do you think is most important to focus on? Academics sometimes lump all different types of terrorists together in their research. But it's very unlikely that the risk factors for being a member of the Irish Republican Army are the same as the risk factors for being a member of al-Qaida.

And the risk factors for initially joining a terrorist organization may be different from the risk factors for continuing to remain in the organization. Finally, the kinds of people who raise money for a terrorist organization may not be the same kinds of people who actually plant bombs.

On the other hand, one can easily go overboard in splitting terrorists into an unwieldy number of categories. I don't think we will ever have one empirically valid instrument to assess the risk of initially becoming a fundraiser for the IRA, and another empirically valid instrument to assess the risk of continuing to be an al-Qaida bomber.

At this moment in history, I would prioritize focusing on al-Qaida-type jihadi terrorists, including significant fundraisers. The third, in May, was on conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the former Rhodesia, and in the violent borderlands of Rwanda and Burundi.

One finding that has emerged so far, Richardson asserts: The longer a conflict goes on, the more reformists are marginalized, and the more ruthless, tough, and intractable the leaders of resistance become. Since the Sept. In three weeks last month, she flew three separate times to Europe. Shortly after the attacks — it was still September — Richardson was at Simmons College for a debate on the proper response of nations to terrorist attacks.

Her opponent — crisis consultant and State Department veteran L. Paul Bremer — went on to act out his responses to terrorism as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in post-invasion Iraq. Richardson conceived the book as a primer on the complexity of terrorism, which she defines as the deliberate and violent targeting of civilians for political purposes. So far, Richardson contended, American response to terrorism — including declaring a global war on fighters without armies or states — has given Islamic terrorists all three outcomes they desire.

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