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In Western democracies, Muslim converts are overrepresented in Islamist terrorism compared to born-and-raised Muslims. Consequently, researchers have begun to consider how the process of conversion...

We thank Marc Sageman for his interest in our article and are grateful to Terrorism and Political Violence for the opportunity to respond. Our study was part of a three-year grant-funded project en...

Since its inception as a modern and evolving discipline, psychology has been concerned with issues of human security. This think piece offers an initial conceptualisation of human security as a broad security concept that encompasses a range of interrelated dimensions that have been responded to by different sub-disciplinary domains within psychology. We advance an argument for a human security psychology as a connecting focal point for general psychology that enables us to bring knowledge from across our eclectic discipline into further dialogue. This is a necessary step in understanding better the state of current thinking on the psychology of security and as a basis for informing further theory, research and practice efforts to address issues of human (in)security. This initial effort is informed by Assemblage Theory, which offers a dynamic and contextually rich perspective on people as agentive beings entangled within evolving natural and social formations that can foster or undermine their experiences of [in]security. The article is completed with a brief agenda for advancing human security psychology.

This medical epithet seems to offer solid guidance for terrorism researchers and counterterrorism practitioners when thinking about the ethical implications of their work—to rephrase it, whatever y...

Perceived peer attitudes (PPA) often influence young men’s violent attitudes and behaviors, although people with higher social network diversity (SND) are less likely to adopt their close peers’ at...

Muslim converts are overrepresented in Islamist terrorism compared to non-convert Muslims – Why? To explore possible explanations, we probed aspects of radicalism and Islamic religiousness within r...

This article responds to Clark McCauley’s commentary on our Attitudes-Behaviors Corrective (ABC) Model of Violent Extremism, in which he contrasts our framework with his own two pyramids model (dev...

Progress in understanding and responding to terrorism and violent extremism has continued to stall in part because we often fail to adequately conceptualize the problem. Perhaps most notabl...

Recent interest in terrorist risk assessment and rehabilitation reveals the likelihood and risk factors for terrorist reengagement and recidivism are poorly understood. Informed by advances in crim...

Involvement in violent extremism is not a one-way street. People can, and do, leave violent extremist movements. Understanding how and why they leave (or want to leave) constitutes actionable knowledge that brings immense practical benefits. Such knowledge may help in designing initiatives aimed at persuading people to leave violent extremist groups as well as reducing the risk of re-engagement in violent extremism in the future. Deradicalization programs have much to offer but they are not a magic solution to a highly complex, fluid problem. Not everyone who engages in violent extremism is necessarily going to benefit from such interventions, and no program can ever expect to produce complete success. Yet, they continue to show promise. Deradicalization programs can be effective for some and, if subjected to greater evaluation efforts, may prove far more beneficial than is currently believed. Despite an abundance (and apparent increase) in programming, a continued lack of evaluation work both fuels skepticism and hinders our ability to believe that there is a strong future for these programs.

This article adds to the growth in data-driven analyses seeking to compare samples of violent extremists with other violent populations of interest. While lone-actor terrorists and public mass murderers are frequently treated as distinct offender types, both engage (or attempt to engage) in largely public and highly publicized acts of violence and often use similar weapons. This article investigates the (dis)similarities between both offender types. We use a series of bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses to compare demographic, psychologic and behavioral variables across 71 lone-actor terrorists and 115 public mass murderers. The results show little distinction in sociodemographic profiles, but significant differences in (a) the degree to which they interact with co-ideologues (b) antecedent event behaviors and (c) the degree to which they leak information before the attack. Overall, our data inform the emerging idea that lone-actor terrorists and public mass shooters are not distinct offender types. There is more that unites them than divides them. Although the over-arching focus of our results are on the few variables that distinguish them, the vast majority (80%+), of the 180+ variables showed no significant difference. We discuss implications for threat assessment and management in the context of these results.

Originality/Value – Popular accounts characterize deradicalization in a simplistic, binary fashion – they are judged to be either effective or ineffective. The current reality is consistent with some of the earliest conceptual discussion – that is, deradicalization programs do not offer a one-size fits all solution, they cannot work for everyone, and they are of immense practical benefit in some cases. The authors’ fundamental argument is that deradicalization initiatives warrant continued investment.

Gatekeepers are those in a position to recognize, in others, potentially problematic presenting issues, and who are willing and able to connect those persons to relevant service providers. In the d...

Scholars have urged a shift in research on mass murder from the creation of typologies to theoretically rich, data-driven comparative examinations of the phenomenon. We seek to redress such calls in two ways. First, we analyze a unique sample of public mass murderers through the multistage explanatory model of cumulative strain theory. Second, we use a comparison group of similarly violent offenders—lone actor terrorists—to provide context to our findings. The results demonstrate that cumulative strain theory usefully describes the trajectory toward violence of public mass murderers, more so when a concept implicit in the theory—grievance—is made explicit.

Religious conversion is the process by which a person commits to the beliefs of a new religious tradition and shifts away from their previously held religious beliefs (Stark and Finke 2000). Religious conversion and its mechanisms have been studied for millennia (Zinnbauer and Pargament in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37(1), 161–180, 1998) and were among the first phenomena to be studied by psychology (Paloutzian et al. in Journal of Personality, 67(6), 1047–1079, 1999). This review of conversion begins with a discussion of diverse conceptualizations, and hence multiple definitions, of conversion. Next, recurring components of major psychological and sociological conversion theories are explored—those consistently recognized as important for understanding and explaining the large amount of variance across conversions. Such components include the convert’s agency, the convert’s social integration, the temporal span of conversion, the nature of conversion’s consequences, and the roles that crisis, emotion, religion, and identity play in conversion. Identifying which components of conversion, and the issues that surround them, are consistently of significance to scholars provides future researchers practical starting points for accurately measuring the conversion process.

Utilizing a sample drawn to represent the general U.S. population, the present study experimentally tested whether a call-center’s disclaimer regarding limits to caller confidentiality (i.e., that ...