EXERCISE: LONE WOLVES
• Presentations on:
• Process of lone wolf radicalisation
• Nature of attack
• Lessons learned for combating terrorism and
preventing next attack
RELIGIOUS TERRORISM
IWOF LECTURE 4
DR FRANK O’DONNELL
STRUCTURE OF PRESENTATION
• Unique characteristics of religious terrorism as
compared to other forms
• Common characteristics of religious terrorist groups
• How religious terrorist groups end
LEARNING OUTCOMES
• Understand factors driving recent popularity of
religious terrorism
• Evaluate difficulties posed by religious terrorist
psychology for combating religious terrorism
• Assess factors explaining successful efforts to
combat religious terrorism
WAVES OF MODERN TERRORISM
1. Anarchist wave – 1880s to 1920s
2. Anti-colonial wave – 1920s-1960s
3. New Left wave – 1960s-1979
4. Religious wave – 1979-present
•
Frustrations with previous secular leftist, Marxist ideologies
David Rapoport, “Generations and Waves: The Key to Understanding Rebel Terror Movements,” UCLA, 2003,
available at http://international.ucla.edu/media/files/David_Rapoport_Waves_of_Terrorism.pdf
MODERN RELIGIOUS TERRORISM: THE FOURTH WAVE
1. Anarchist wave – 1880s to 1920s
2. Anti-colonial wave – 1920s-1960s
3. New Left wave – 1960s-1979
4. Religious wave – 1979-present
DIFFERENCES WITH OTHER FORMS OF TERRORISM
Symbolic tactic: suicide bomber
General tactics and scale of violence
Motivations
Bringing religious terrorists to the
negotiating table
RELIGIOUS TERRORISM IS NOT SOLELY ISLAMIC
TERRORISM
New America Foundation study. Data available at: http://securitydata.newamerica.net/extremists/deadlyattacks.html
COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF RELIGIOUS TERRORIST
GROUPS: PSYCHOLOGY
1. Motivating sense of humiliation
2. Demonisation of enemies
• “The conflict is between God's will and kingdom
and Satan's opposing will and kingdom” – Rev.
Paul Hill, US right-wing terrorist
3. Goal of union with God
• Purifying world through extermination of impure
people
• 9/11 Atta letter: perpetrators “heading toward
eternal paradise”
4. Sanctification of violence
• Graffiti in Gaza: “Death in the way of Allah is
life”
James W. Jones, “Sacred Terror: The Psychology of
Contemporary Religious Terrorism”, in Andrew Murphy (ed.),
The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence
(Blackwell, 2011)
COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF RELIGIOUS TERRORIST
GROUPS: TACTICS
1. Often indiscriminate targeting
1. Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord Christian
fundamentalist group plots to poison city water
supplies – 1980s
2. Jewish Underground group plots to bomb Muslim
holy sites on Temple Mount – 1984
2. Propensity to use WMD
3. Disinterest in proportionality
4. Spiralling scale of violence
1. Media saturation compelling greater scale of
attack in order to shock
2. Demonisation dynamic means little inhibitions
against ever-greater attacks
HOW RELIGIOUS TERRORIST GROUPS END
1. Important to distinguish between group long-term aims and
near-term means
•
Svensson and Harding (2011) study Asian religious terrorist
groups from 1989-2008: more than half reached some political
accommodation with government through focus on changing
near-term means
2. Groups can disintegrate due to mundane causes
• Al-Qaeda in Iraq:
o
o
o
o
Overpromising and underdelivering services
Bureaucratic infighting
Wasteful financial management
Vulnerable communications and logistics
Also: Isak Svensson and Emily Harding, “How Holy Wars End:
Exploring the Termination Patterns of Conflicts With Religious
Dimensions in Asia”, Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence Vol.
23 Issue 2 (2011)
LEARNING OUTCOMES
• Understand factors driving recent popularity of
religious terrorism
• Evaluate difficulties posed by religious terrorist
psychology for combating religious terrorism
• Assess factors explaining successful efforts to
combat religious terrorism