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While research on who and why individuals engage in terrorism has moved a long way since psychopathological and psychoanalytical approaches dominated, there remain gaps and shortcomings in our knowledge and approaches to understanding who is likely to engage in this form of political violence. Conventional wisdom posits that terrorists are typically male, uneducated, impoverished and between the ages of 18 and 23. Studies and emerging patterns over the past decade have refuted many of these stereotypes. Of the existing empirical research in the literature, single-?-case studies dominate. Although highly informative, they are also context-?- specific and thus their findings may not easily translate to other conflict areas. To address these shortcomings, the socio-?-demographic and role profiles of 219 Palestinian suicide bombers are compared with 510 terrorists indicted within the United States. These cases allow us to simultaneously compare the profiles of two very different contexts. More importantly, we are able to evaluate and compare the profiles of suicide bombers with more conventional terrorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between civil war and terrorism? Recent attempts to un- pack the similarities between these types of political violence have either focused on creating actor-based categories (terrorists vs. insurgents) and elucidating the different reasons for being one or the other or comparing and contrasting each to discern whether they have similar etiologies. In contrast to previous approaches, we use geo-referenced terror event data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to show where and when terror happens and whether it occurs inside or outside of civil war zones. We investigate in detail six separate violent campaigns to illustrate some of the patterns in terrorism and civil war events. While the study of terrorism and civil war mostly occurs in separate scholarly communities, we argue for more work that incorporates insights from each research program and we offer an exciting possibility for future research by merging geo-referenced terror and civil war data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent explosion of work has occurred seeking to understand under what conditions groups use terror to pursue their goals. Regime type is one condition that is prominently discussed. Democratic regimes have been linked to terrorism for contending reasons with some scholars claiming that constraints on the executive and free civil rights increase the likelihood of these regimes experiencing terror while other scholars claim that democracy promotes nonviolent political participation thus reducing the likelihood of terror.Corroborating evidence has been used for both relationships leading to the following puzzle: why do some democratic regimes seem to foster terrorism while others do not? We offer three contributions to this debate. Beginning with the assumption that terror groups want to change government policy, we argue that the more veto players present in a political system, the more likely the system is to experience deadlock. Given the inability of societal actors to change policies through nonviolent and institutional participation, these regimes will have a greater likelihood of experiencing terror events. Second, we argue that the terrorism data generating process has been misidentified. In short, two types of zeros exist in terrorism data that are different but have been treated the same in previous models.Some states across the entire period of most samples never experience terror while other states only experience terror in a few years and thus have some probability of experiencing terror in the future. We use zero-inflated count models to model this process. Third, we use new data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) that was previously unavailable. Unlike previous terrorism databases, this new data incorporates both domestic and international incidents of terrorism while spanning from 1970 to 1997. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]