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Global Change, Peace & Security
ISSN: 1478-1158 (Print) 1478-1166 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpar20
Political rage: terrorism and the politics of
emotion
David Wright-Neville & Debra Smith
To cite this article:
David Wright-Neville & Debra Smith (2009) Political rage: terrorism
and the politics of emotion, Global Change, Peace & Security, 21:1, 85-98, DOI:
10.1080/14781150802659390
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Political rage: terrorism and the politics of emotion
David Wright-Neville
and Debra Smith
Global Terrorism Research Centre and Department of Political and Social Inquiry,
Monash University, Caulfield and Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Recently there has been a renewed interest in the role of emotion as both a site of political
knowledge and as a contributing dynamic in the stability or upheaval of political institutions.
While it is widely recognised that emotion is directly implicated in terrorist behaviour, terror-
ism studies has not critically engaged in this revitalised theorising. As a small step towards
addressing this analytical gap we argue that there is a need to see terrorism as a political
act grounded in a particular set of human emotions triggered in certain social circumstances.
We begin with a brief discussion of the treatment of emotion within terrorism studies before
examining how modernity might contribute to an intensification of emotion within political
behaviour. We posit that one outcome of this intensification is the adoption of violent
forms of political agency by individuals seeking to address real or perceived grievances.
Keywords:
emotion; terrorism; political violence; political emotions; rage
Introduction
Understanding the relationship between emotion and human behaviour has long fascinated those
who endeavour to contribute to a broader knowledge of human nature. Great classical philoso-
phers such as Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes and Hume all had identifiable theories
of emotion. It was Cicero, for instance, who reminded orators of his day of the power of emotion
when attempting to persuade an audience. In particular he encouraged the use of
pathos
(the
appeal to emotion), because it is by drawing on emotion, he argued, that opinion can be
swayed most effectively.
1
Leaders within the global
neojihadist
movement also recognise the importance of emotion in
mobilising the sometimes latent political agency of their audience.
2
Neojhadist
literature is
replete with narratives that use emotion to trigger direct political action. For example, the fol-
lowing quote taken from what could loosely be described as a ‘jihad-friendly’ website is indica-
tive of a style of discourse that attempts to evoke certain emotional responses among a target
audience; responses which are then used to consolidate a new community of resistance.
3
‘Know, my beloved brother, that the path of Jiha¯d is not paved with roses, rather it is a path
that is paved with severed limbs and blood, and it is full of fear and danger.’
4
In the case of
neojihadi
terrorism, an examination of martyr videos, filmatic montages such as those of the
Corresponding author. Email: David.Wright-Neville@arts.monash.edu.au
1
Here we have in mind Cicero’s
De Oratore
, particularly book I, chapter V.
2
For an explanation of the concept of
neojihadism
and its utility as an explanatory concept see Pete Lentini, ‘Antipodal
Terrorists? Accounting for Differences in Australian and “Global” Neojihadists’, in
The Globalization of Violence
,
ed. Richard Devetak and Christopher W. Hughes (London and New York: Routledge 2008), 181 – 202.
3
For example see M. Hafez, ‘Martyrdom Mythology in Iraq: How Jihadists Frame Suicide Terrorism in Videos and
Biographies’,
Terrorism and Political Violence
19, no. 1 (2007): 95 – 115.
4
Abu Usamah Al-Hazin, ‘To the One who falls Imprisoned: Messages of Advice’, http:
//
tibyan.wordpress.com
/
2008
/
06
/
06
/
to-the-one-who-falls-into-imprisonment-messages-of-advice
/
(accessed 11 June 2008).
Global Change, Peace & Security
Vol. 21, No. 1, February 2009, 85 – 98
ISSN 1478-1158 print
/
ISSN 1478-1166 online
#
2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14781150802659390
http:
//
www.informaworld.com
Baghdad Sniper, still images, websites, and sermons designed to motivate and inspire young
men to accept violent forms of
neojihadist
ideology all illustrate the strong emphasis given to
emotive narratives.
5
Emotive writing is combined with pictures showing Muslim people
being mistreated or humiliated in an attempt to provoke or escalate outrage and anger within
the wider Muslim community. These emotional appeals are often then juxtaposed against
pictures of Muslims actively fighting American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or resisting
forces in other conflict zones such as Chechnya and Kashmir, in an attempt to ignite emotional
responses and transform them into political action.
As Davies has noted in an earlier exploration of the role of affect in politics, individuals
search for sites of political participation when they experience something that draws so
deeply on their emotions that it initiates a forceful response.
6
Davies’ focus was on applying
the insights of psychology to understanding the realm of political agency within its institutiona-
lised forms. Moreover, Davies did so in a scholarly era when violence cast in religious or cultural
terms was largely considered a thing of the past. However, with the benefit of hindsight, his
observations hold for new sites of political agency that have arisen in response to globalisation
and which have resurrected the potency of religion and culture as organising principles for
political resistance.
While the meaning of ‘globalisation’ remains highly contested, and undoubtedly means
different things to different people, one comparatively non-controversial aspect of globalising
processes as far as scholarship is concerned has been the development of fresh arenas within
which new political relationships can be formed.
7
This development provides novel challenges
for understanding the relationship between emotion and political action as we are now faced with
the emergence of innovative political, cultural, economic and psychological structures, all of
which have a simultaneously local and global dimension.
8
The experiences which elicit the
sort of deeply emotional responses that drive a person towards political engagement are becom-
ing increasingly complex as individuals become more sensitive to events taking place outside
their own spatially and temporally defined environment. At the level of foreign policy, for
example, the complicating consequences of this development have been spelled out in the
manner in which diasporic communities can now become both politically energised and inspired
to network globally against policy initiatives implemented by the governments of their adopted
lands.
9
This is not to say that their emotional bonds remain solely with their nations of origin.
This is far too simplistic in today’s world. Rather, emotional attachment is complicated by
multiple loyalties that extend beyond nations and which vary in intensity from issue to issue
and, naturally, person to person.
This increasingly complex relationship between affect, political participation and globalisa-
tion is expressed in the following comments made by Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the
suicide bombers who carried out the attacks on the London public transport system on 7 July
2005:
Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all
over the world, and your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly respon-
sible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be
5
Although the same concept can be applied to terrorism perpetrated by many non-Muslim groups.
6
A.F. Davies,
Skills, Outlooks and Passions: A Psychoanalytic Contribution to the Study of Politics
(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), 293.
7
Zygmunt Bauman,
Liquid Modernity
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
8
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘On Glocalization: Or Globalization for Some, Localization for Others’,
Thesis Eleven
no 54
(1998): 37 – 49. Also see John Urry,
Global Complexity
(Malden, MA: Polity, 2003).
9
See Shane Brighton, ‘British Muslims, Multiculturalism, and UK Foreign Policy: “Integration” and “Cohesion”
Beyond the State’,
International Affairs
83, no. 1 (2007), 1 – 17.
86
D. Wright-Neville and D. Smith
our targets, and until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment, and torture of my people we will
not stop this fight.
10
From the perspective of analysing motive it is the case that the accuracy of Khan’s grievances is
less important than the way in which his perceptions of them shaped his actions. In Khan’s case,
his emotional attachment to fellow ‘Muslim brothers and sisters’ overwhelmed his emotional
attachments to secular Muslims in the UK, who in other parts of the video he chastises and ident-
ifies as legitimate targets for violence. The passions displayed by Khan evince an allegiance to
the ideals and values of an imagined transnational polity – a community of ‘legitimate’ believers
existing beyond spatial boundaries. Simultaneously, his passions towards the polity into which
he was born and had lived all his life had gradually taken on a hostile and retributive tone – so
much so that he no longer identified himself with fellow Britons, experiencing instead a deeply
rooted sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’, with the principal protagonists being his own government and its
non-Muslim and Muslim supporters.
In short, emotion – or more precisely emotional attachment – has become the site of a
vigorous tug of war. As globalisation dilutes the emotional power of narratives centring on
the nation state and opens up ever varied spaces for alternative emotional attachments, global
terrorist networks such as al Qaeda have entered the emotional marketplace. Their skill lies in
an ability to tap into emotions such as anger, frustration and humiliation through a narrative
that explains these existential phenomena in terms of victimhood and oppression by outsiders.
However, at the same time the narratives pushed by
neojihadist
groups are designed to stimulate
positive emotions such as love, compassion, loyalty, solidarity and pride and then to channel
these feelings towards political action.
The case of Mohammad Sidique Khan demonstrates that emotion remains a vital dimension
of individual political agency, a powerful source of connectedness within terrorist groups, but
also an under-utilised weapon for countering terrorism. Despite this, political passions and
emotion have rarely figured in contemporary theories of terrorism and as such they are
largely ignored as analytical tools. As a first step towards addressing this lacuna there is a
need to recognise the critical nexus between emotion and violent political agency.
11
Before
this can be done, however, there is a need for emotion to be historically and sociologically con-
textualised. To paraphrase Laqueur, terrorism has almost always been a reflection of the society
in which it occurs, and so just as the appeal of the anarchist terrorist group the Narodniks was a
reflection of the deprivations of tsarist Russia in the late 1800s, so too is the terrorism of
contemporary groups an expression of real of perceived deprivations in the modern world.
12
Terrorism studies and emotion
In recent years many scholars working in the field of political science have attempted to
reinvigorate the study of emotion, highlighting its importance to contemporary political
10
Taken from the suicide video of Mohammed Sidiq. The video and a transcript are available from the Middle East
Media Research Institute (MEMRI) website, http:
//
www.memritv.org
/
(accessed 20 September 2007).
11
In this sense we are suggesting the continuation of work on how the emotions of individuals might interact with
social conditions to result in acts of violence or brutality. Notable earlier studies on this include Thomas
J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger,
Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts
(Lincoln,
NE: iUniverse, 2001 [1991]); James Gilligan,
Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes
(New York:
Putnam Publishing Group, 1996); Roger D. Peterson,
Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resent-
ment in Twentieth-century Eastern Europe
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jack
Barbalet, ‘Emotions in Politics: From the Ballot to Suicide Terrorism’, in
Emotion, Politics and Society
, ed.
Simon Clarke, Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006), 31 – 59; Jonathan H. Turner, ‘Self, Emotions, and Extreme Violence: Extending Symbolic Interactionist
Theorizing’,
Symbolic Interaction
30, no. 4 (2007): 501 – 30.
12
Walter Laqueur,
No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty First Century
(New York: Continuum, 2003), 11 – 12.
Global Change, Peace & Security
87
challenges.
13
However, Terrorism Studies has been a notable exception to this trend, even though
it is generally accepted that emotion is an important dynamic in terrorist behaviour.
14
In his recent
critique of methodologies in Terrorism Studies, Gunning suggests that there has been a tendency
to focus on delegitimising the actions of terrorists and favouring the objectives and perspectives of
state security over any systematic examination of the subjective journeys of those who engage in
sub-state terrorist practices.
15
Some clear exceptions to this exist within the recently reinvigorated
sub-field of terrorist psychology.
16
However, even within this realm the role of emotion has not
been systematically examined. Reasons for this may include real difficulties surrounding both
methodology and the obvious dangers in accessing and interviewing subjects. However, it may
also be interpreted as a side-effect of long-running debates surrounding pathology or normality
within terrorists’ psychology. That is to say, in the largely successful attempt to establish that
terrorists are driven by rational political beliefs rather than psychopathological tendencies,
emotions may have been inadvertently relegated to the category of the ‘irrational’.
17
Those who have sought to ground terrorist behaviour in broadly psychopathological traits (as
opposed to mental illness) have tended to draw unproblematically on the passions to emphasise
the role of emotions such as anger, frustration, aggression, humiliation and hatred. As such,
Peters claims to have found evidence of ‘the madness of a civilization’ in the political passions
of Islamic activists.
18
In a more nuanced application of the principles of psychological analysis,
Post has demonstrated how ethno-nationalist terrorism in particular is a result of hatred ‘bred to
the bone’.
19
From this perspective, passion is presented as a pathological bias that distorts ration-
ality in ways that make an individual vulnerable to violent forms of political expression.
Alternatively, scholars such as Horgan and Silke point out that terrorist acts represent only
the final public act of a much longer often silent process in which people from a variety of back-
grounds and with various personality traits become radicalised.
20
This idea of the evolution of
terrorist violence acknowledges the role of emotions, particularly frustration, anger and humilia-
tion in driving a person towards an incremental embrace of violence, and as such it acknowl-
edges the importance of emotional processes. Of similar value are examinations of the
13
For example see Neta Crawford, ‘The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional Relation-
ships’,
International Security
24, no. 4 (2000): 116 – 56; Jonathan Mercer, ‘Rationality and Psychology in
International Politics’,
International Organizations
59 (Winter 2005): 77 – 106; Emma Hutchinson and Roland
Bleiker, ‘Fear no More: Emotions and World Politics’,
Review of International Studies
34 (2008): 115 – 35.
14
This acceptance is expressed by Slavoj Z
ˇ izˇek when he connects the violent acts of terrorism to the experience of resent-
ment. Importantly, however, Z
ˇ izˇek suggests that violence needs to be explored in both its ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’
forms, therefore connecting terrorists’ experiences of resentment and subsequent violent behaviour to the wider social
conditions in which it manifests. See Slavoj Z
ˇ izˇek,
Violence
(London: Profile Books, 2008), especially 72 – 9.
15
Jeroen Gunning, ‘A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?’,
Government and Opposition
, 42, no. 3 (2007): 368 – 71. It
should also be noted here that Gunning expresses a degree of scepticism over whether a delineated field of ‘terrorism
studies’ actually exists. Furthermore, he questions the value of creating such a separate discipline on the grounds that
it may ‘limit the necessity for interdisciplinary’.
16
For example see John Horgan,
The Psychology of Terrorism
(London and New York: Routledge, 2005); Andrew
Silke, ed.,
Terrorists, Victims, and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and its Consequences
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003); James Jones,
The Blood the Cries Out from the Earth: The Psychology of Religious
Terrorism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
17
Max Abrahms has recently challenged the Strategic Choice Model of terrorism suggesting that it largely ignores the
role of affective ties. Although suggesting that the role of affect is not limited to bonds of solidarity between ter-
rorists, we certainly agree that this is a significant area of importance. Like Abrahms, we reject the idea that an affec-
tive component in terrorist behaviour renders their behaviour irrational. See Max Abrahms, ‘What Terrorists Really
Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy’,
International Security
32, no. 4 (Spring 2008): 78 – 105.
18
Ralph Peters,
Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World
(Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002), 57.
19
Jerrold Post,
The Mind of the Terrorist: The Psychology of Terrorism from al Qaeda to the IRA
(Basingstoke:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007). Post emphasises the role of hate in constructing terrorists’ psychological ordering.
20
John Horgan, ‘The Social and Psychological Characteristics of Terrorism and Terrorists’, in
Root Causes of Terror-
ism: Myths, Realities and Ways Forward
, ed. Tore Bjorgo (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 51; Andrew
Silke, ‘Becoming a Terrorist’, in
Terrorists,Victims and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and its
Consequences
, ed. Andrew Silke (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003), 29 – 54.
88
D. Wright-Neville and D. Smith
importance of group solidarity and of terrorists’ perceptions of themselves as soldiers in a just
war – a terrorist ontology that draws on notions of pride as well as in-group compassion and
love. The role of emotion in terrorist behaviour is also obvious with respect to the notion of ‘trig-
gering events’ – incidents that tip an individual from being a passive yet angry observer into an
active and motivated terrorist. Using the events of Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972 in North-
ern Ireland as an example, Horgan points out how triggering events built ‘a sense of communal
identification with the victimized, and an often unwavering, confident dedication to the preser-
vation and importance of the memory of the particular event itself’.
21
The deaths of 13 unarmed
demonstrators, shot by a parachute regiment of the British Army, had a catalysing impact on the
republican community and boosted significantly intramural emotional bonds and attachment to
the provisional IRA as a ‘defender’ of ‘Irish’ welfare and rights.
These approaches to explaining terrorist acts contribute significantly to our understanding of
the role of emotion in driving the process of becoming a terrorist. However, they fall short of
systematically analysing the way in which emotion is formed in response to judgements or
appraisals regarding the empirical world.
22
In other words, while the recognition of emotion
in the evolution of terrorism is an important step forward, models of terrorism are still not
integrated into wider theories of contemporary society. As a result, there is a tendency to
treat terrorists and terrorism as
sui generis
, as an aberrant phenomena disconnected from
wider social and political contexts. Against this, there is a need to view emotions not just as
biologically determined reactions to a given situation (as in ‘lashing out in anger’ or ‘seething
with rage’), but as socially and culturally constructed human phenomena that cannot be divorced
from the wider social circumstances in which people find themselves.
23
This is not to argue that
all terrorists are innocent victims of their social circumstances, but as individual political agents
they craft a world view, and set of responses to it, out of a personal emotional repertoire that is
heavily influenced by events that surround them. From this perspective, it is important to note
that those who begin the psychological trajectory towards terrorist behaviour may draw on
emotional energy generated from both historical and immediate social contexts which they
perceived as exclusionary, oppressive and sometimes cruel.
24
The tendency to ignore the role of emotion in the public sphere has a long history. The
Enlightenment’s favouring of science and reason over emotion has left us with an understanding
of emotion as something that needs to be conquered or subsumed by reason. Underpinning most
Enlightenment theories of emotion and human behaviour has been a conviction that emotion is
problematic, something that distorts or interferes with reason. Emotion was often viewed as a
powerful yet enigmatic force that needed to be controlled or repressed in order for (wo)man
to maximise her
/
his freedom within society. Within theories of International Relations, this per-
spective is expressed most strongly within the Realist school of thought wherein the passions are
understood as powerful yet dangerous forces of human behaviour which unless restrained loom
as a perennial threat to peace. This has led to theories and policies designed to protect states from
‘irrational’ outbursts by purging diplomacy of any semblance of emotion. Rather, diplomacy is
taught and practised under an imaginary cloak of dispassionate rationality.
In the wake of the Cold War Samuel Huntington’s much debated
Clash of Civilizations
thesis
helped rejuvenate the idea that emotion and passion remained an aspect of diplomacy when he
21
Horgan,
The Psychology of Terrorism
, 87.
22
For an excellent discussion on the relationship between emotion and judgement see Martha C. Nussbaum,
Uphea-
vals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
23
This idea is explored more fully in Social Movement Theory. For example see, Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and
Francesca Polletta, eds.,
Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements
(Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2001); and Helena Flam and Debra King, eds.,
Emotions and Social Movements
(London and
New York: Routledge, 2005).
24
James Waller,
Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing
(Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press 2007), 269.
Global Change, Peace & Security
89
suggested that Judeo-Christian civilisation differed from non-Western civilisations partly by the
extent to which the former had successfully distanced reason from emotion in the shaping of
political institutions and agency. This theory achieved a new saliency in the wake of 9
/
11
when Huntingtonesque themes were quickly appropriated to explain why Muslims in particular
were prone to such outrageous acts of violence. From this perspective, political emotions have
taken on a particularly dangerous cultural flavour.
25
For many who are influenced by this view,
the tendency of Muslim communities to allow their emotions to shape their actions not only mili-
tates against rational behaviour, but it also presages a new era of conflict and uncertainty.
Applied to the phenomenon of terrorism, however, this view is at odds with the widely held con-
sensus that terrorists are in fact rational political actors whose actions reflect the outcome of a
steady intensification of feelings of injustice, deprivation and humiliation. Yet it is our view
that even this critique of the Huntingtonesque undertones of much contemporary terrorism
analysis fails to negotiate an adequate understanding of the actual nexus between emotions
and terrorist behaviour. In an attempt to distance themselves from this understanding of the
irrational and destructive emotional forces underpinning terrorism, the general field of Terrorism
Studies has focused on the rationality of terrorists’ psychological ordering in a way that has by-
passed any systematic examination of the emotions. As Neta Crawford has claimed in relation to
the broader study of International Relations, we need to examine how emotions such as anger,
fear, hate, love, compassion and frustration, to name a few, are institutionalised within our exist-
ing social structures and political processes and how this interacts with individual emotional
responses to changing events in the world.
26
As a step towards this end there is a need for meso-level examinations that draw on multi-
disciplinary research to understand terrorist behaviour. Such an approach offers the possibility
of exploring how an individual’s emotions are developed within broader, more dynamic
emotional processes.
27
That is to say, we need to begin to explore how an individual’s emotion-
al life is deeply influenced by, but also influences, their perception and experience of the social
world. This level of analysis seems particularly suited to a study of terrorist behaviour because it
prioritises the role of an individual’s perception of their wider social milieu when considering
how micro-level mechanisms become activated, triggered and sustained within particular social
environments. We also need to explore how a person’s experience of emotion helps them to
move towards political action, but, more importantly, towards a particular
type
of political
action, in this case violence. A focus on the mediating role of emotion will contribute to an
understanding of how anger, frustration and humiliation, or even of love and compassion,
helps frame an individual’s psychological process of rationalising violence. Interviews with ter-
rorists and examinations of terrorist biographies suggest that feelings of anger, humiliation and
frustration figure significantly in the process leading towards terrorist behaviour.
28
However,
terrorists also strongly express emotions such as love (in the case of
neojihadists
, of Allah,
their colleagues, and the
Ummah
), compassion (for those they perceive as suffering under the
existing system) and although it might be difficult for some to acknowledge, courage. While
emotions such as anger, humiliation or frustration can contribute to a person seeking a
25
See Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells, eds.,
The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy
(New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003).
26
See Neta Crawford, ‘The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional Relationships’,
Inter-
national Security
24, no. 4 (2000): 119.
27
Christian von Scheve and Rolf von Luede, ‘Emotion and Social Structures: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach’,
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour
35, no. 3 (2005): 306.
28
For example see, Jerrold Post, Ehud Sprinzak and Laurita Denny, ‘The Terrorists in Their Own Words: Interviews
with Thirty Five Incarcerated Middle Eastern Terrorists’,
Terrorism and Political Violence
15, no. 1 (2003): 171 –
84; Andrew Silke, ‘Becoming a Terrorist’; Marc Sageman,
Understanding Terror Networks
(Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Christine Fair and Bryan Shepherd, ‘Who Supports Terrorism? Evidence from
Fourteen Muslim Countries’,
Studies in Conflict and Terrorism
29, no. 1 (2006): 51 – 74.
90
D. Wright-Neville and D. Smith
pathway for political action, love and compassion are necessary for the moral justification and
framing of a terrorist act and for maintaining solidarity within the terrorist group.
29
This pro-
vides a challenge to popular perceptions of terrorists as either cold, ruthless killers devoid of
all emotion, or as emotionally driven madmen devoid of rationality. Instead, it works from
the assumption that terrorists, like the majority of people, are simultaneously emotive
and
rational political actors.
Terrorism and contemporary social conditions
Conceived in this way we can return to Laqueur’s point that terrorism is an inevitable reflection
of the society within which it occurs. One of the defining characteristics of our contemporary era
is globalisation, or more specifically a neo-liberal form of globalisation, which is changing both
the internal social and political milieu of individual states but also forging new patterns of
emotional response and reaction.
30
The 1970s saw terrorism break its hitherto strong parochial focus and assume a more global
character. The attack on the Israeli athletes’ compound by the Black September terrorists at the
Munich Olympics in 1972 is perhaps the best example of this early recognition of the political
utility of a global audience. But so too were the nascent links at this time between the anti-
capitalist Red Army Faction of Germany, France’s Action Directe, the Italian Red Brigades,
the Japanese Red Army and various Palestinian groups. In addition there were the operational
links forged between the IRA and Libya, and the IRA and the Basque separatist group ETA.
More recently, the global al Qaeda network, and those groups in the developed and developing
worlds that are inspired by its message, has emerged as one of the most adept manipulators of the
emotional traumas associated with globalisation.
Before teasing out more fully the nexus between globalisation and the emotional precondi-
tions for terrorism, it is worth pausing briefly to reflect on the manner in which the emotional
impact of changing social, political and economic conditions have been theorised in the past.
This is because important insights into the emotional character of global terrorism can be
gained by drawing on earlier scholars of the globalisation of capitalism. Especially important
in this regard was Karl Polanyi’s seminal text
The Great Transformation
which located the
origins of fascism in the emotional trauma bought about by the disembedding and disorientating
effects of free-market economics.
31
For Polanyi, the ruthless logic of the market artificially disconnected people’s economic
activities from their social relations, destroying complex relationships of mutual obligation
and undermining communal values. The logic underlying Polanyi’s argument develops from
his historical observations of how, when left to the devices of free-market economics, society
was subverted and altered due to the ‘disembedding’ of the economy from the rest of
society. For Polanyi, the artificial divide which classical economic theory and practice creates
between the economic realm and the rest of human social activity creates a tension which
demands the assertion of protective measures, of which he understood fascism to be a particu-
larly repugnant form. Indeed, alongside the ‘great transformation’ to industrial society, Polanyi
identified a second transformation which was more emotional in nature. In Polanyi’s analysis,
29
Jonathan Haidt, ‘Positive Emotions Motivate Terrorists’, http:
//
www.thefederationonline.org
/
events
/
Briefings
/
2006_SPSP_DHS
/
Haidt_Emotions_Sum.pdf (accessed 4 March 2007).
30
For a fuller exploration of the neo-liberal character of contemporary globalisation see David Harvey,
A Brief History
of Neoliberalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For an examination of the ontological consequences of
neo-liberal globalisation see Catrina Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the
Search for Ontological Security’,
Political Psychology
25, no. 5 (2004): 741 – 67.
31
Karl Polanyi,
The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(Boston: Beacon Press,
2001 [1944]). This argument was first articulated by Jack Barbalet,
Emotions, Social Theory and Social Structure: A
Macrosociological Approach
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 172.
Global Change, Peace & Security
91
the appeal of fascism could be understood as an
emotional
expression of the psychological trans-
formations brought about by free-market economics.
32
In a similar way, the emotional appeal of
neojihadi
narratives about the contemporary state of the world are rooted in the ontological
uncertainties faced by Muslim diasporas at the margins of Western societies or in those countries
where the political elites appear more beholden to global markets and Western fads than their
own local customs and needs. This phenomenon is by no means confined to the Muslim com-
munity. In a similar vein, a perception of indifference by political elites to the existential uncer-
tainties generated by globalisation also goes a long way to explaining the rise of alternative
fundamentalisms within all major world religions.
33
It is therefore possible to build on Polanyi’s understanding of the connection between market
forces and emotional responses to offer some important insights into the relationship between
contemporary social conditions, emotionality and terrorist violence. In particular, Polanyi
exposes the futility of attempting to banish emotionality from the public sphere and confine it
to the sphere of the purely ‘personal’. What Polanyi showed us was that contra the view of lib-
erals, emotionality is an ever present part of the public life. Any attempt to separate rationality
from emotion is therefore an artificial exercise as the two are, and will remain, inextricably
linked.
Another liberal myth that Polanyi helps expose and which helps shed light on the relationship
between emotion and terrorism in the contemporary world was his rejection of the idea that there
exists an equal possibility for all individuals to participate rationally, consciously and equally in
economic and political decision-making processes.
34
This has been built on by many writers, but
in the work of scholars such as Barbalet we can see how, if denied the scope to participate through
rational political channels, an individual will be likely to default to emotional channels in an
attempt to influence their social milieu.
35
This does not suggest that this default position is
devoid of rationality. On the contrary, the shift in balance draws our attention to the rejuvenated
understanding of emotionality and rationality as two sides of the one coin rather than dichotomous
phenomena.
These views are also consistent with insights generated by psychoanalyst and social theorist
Erik Erikson. In particular, Erikson was interested in the manner in which the rapid changes
associated with modernisation lead to traditional patterns of identity and solidarity being
replaced by new and often retrogressive alternatives. For instance, in his essay
Identity Con-
fusion in Life History and Case History
, Erikson noted that modern technological and economic
development resulted
in a loss of a sense of cosmic wholeness, of providential playfulness, and of heavenly sanction for the
means of production – and destruction. In large parts of the world this apparently leads to a ready
fascination with totalistic world views, views predicting millenniums and cataclysms and advocating
self-appointed mortal gods. Technological centralization today can give small groups of such fanatic
ideologists the concrete power of totalitarian state machines, and of small and secret or large and
open machineries of experimentation.
36
The idea that economic modernisation generates disorienting effects which under some cir-
cumstances can lead to violence is an important one. Even a cursory survey of the manifestos and
epistles issued by a wide range of contemporary terrorists reveals a focus on the disembedding
consequences of economic and social globalisation, especially growing perceptions of inequities
in wealth and opportunity, a sense that local cultures face extinction in the face of a flood of
32
Polanyi,
The Great Transformation
, 207.
33
Mark Juergensmeyer,
Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, From Christian Militias to al
Qaeda
(Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2008).
34
Barbalet,
Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure
, 174.
35
Ibid., 174.
36
Erik H. Erikson,
Identity: Youth and Crisis
(New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994 [1968]), 191.
92
D. Wright-Neville and D. Smith
foreign cultures and images, and the view that a coalition of Western governments, corporations
and indigenous secular elites constitutes a major assault upon the freedom and dignity of
ordinary folk.
37
Grassroots Muslim resistance to these perceptions has a long history stretching back several
centuries when the accoutrements of Modernity were transposed onto the Muslim world via
colonisation. One of the consequences of this has been to cultivate resentment towards the
West. As Fanon demonstrated in his study of Algeria, in the face of colonisation and domination,
the culture and identity of the dominated is denigrated and deemed inferior in comparison to the
powerful.
38
Understanding the long history of humiliation, anger, resentment, envy and frustra-
tion which has arisen as a result of this history, and combining this with an understanding of the
possible emotional default position of human agency under conditions of globalisation, is a
critical step towards understanding the deeper dynamic forces which drive the urge to violent
political behaviour in the modern world. In other words, in our attempt to understand the
genesis of contemporary terrorism it would be folly to ignore the interplay between rational
and emotional political agency as it is shaped by contemporary global circumstances at the
economic, political and social levels.
Why violence?
The above discussion raises an important question: Why is the increase of emotion within
political agency
sometimes
expressed through violence? The emphasis placed on the word
‘sometimes’ is critical. It is simply not the case that every increase in emotionality automatically
translates into a higher propensity for violence. Before violence can manifest a number of other
proximate influences need to come into play.
It is obviously not the case that every person who experiences sustained anger and humilia-
tion will become a terrorist; there are wide variety of circumstances that can interrupt the process
of violent emotional outbursts against society, including redirecting violent urges against the self
through drug and alcohol abuse, non-overtly political forms of anti-social behaviour, or even by
learning to peacefully or constructively resolve negative experiences. But while it is true that not
every angry, alienated and humiliated person becomes a terrorist, all terrorists have a deep sense
of social anger, alienation and humiliation.
39
It is worth reiterating here that terrorists are in no
way hapless victims of a seething rage. On the contrary, the point is that the kind of quiet, object-
directed rage that terrorists experience is simultaneously cognitive and emotional.
Reaching the point at which the urge to violence against fellow humans is triggered is not
straightforward and invariably requires the individual to pass through a process involving the
steady intensification of key emotions. A useful mode for understanding this process is provided
by James Waller whose extensive research into mass killings focuses on the ‘proximate’ and
‘ultimate’ causes of violence. Proximate causes are those that actually trigger the violent act
while ultimate causes are evolutionary in the sense that over time they incrementally prime
the individual for violent behaviour. At both the proximate and ultimate stages there exists a sig-
nificant degree of social construction. In the case of the former, our attention needs to focus on
the role of the terrorist group, particularly the individual’s emotional attachment to the group and
37
See Bruce Lawrence, ed.,
Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden
(London and New York:
Verso, 2005).
38
Franz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1967).
39
See Louise Richardson,
What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Terrorist Threat
(London: John Murray Publish-
ers, 2006), chapter 4. See especially the quote (p. 126) by one of the 9
/
11 hijackers Ahmad al-Haznawi al-Ghamidi:
‘The time of humiliation is over. It is time to kill the Americans in their own backyard, among their sons, and near
their forces and intelligence.’
Global Change, Peace & Security
93
the manner in which this attachment can shape both their world view but also associated patterns
of behaviour. In the case of ultimate causes of violence there is a need to look more widely,
especially at the history of the individual’s engagement with society and how the experiences
this engagement has generated can foster a hostile world view that leads to the possibility
that an individual will seek out and join a group of like-minded individuals. It is this process that
Wiktorowicz refers to when he deploys the concept of ‘cognitive openings’ to explain how alie-
nated young men in Britain have been lured into extremist organisations such as al Muhajir-
oun.
40
A cognitive opening occurs when the ontological security of the person’s existence is
called into question by social or personal events, creating a sense of detachment and anomie
and triggering a new search for meaning.
41
Cognitive openings are especially prevalent
among those buffeted by the rapid pace of social change driven by globalisation, especially
those who perceive themselves vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the open market in its various
manifestations. But not everybody who experiences feelings of ontological insecurity will
find comfort and meaning in membership in new religious movements let alone those with a
violent orientation. As Wiktorowicz notes: ‘At the heart of decisions about joining is the
process of persuasion. Individuals rarely awake with a sudden taste for radicalism or an epiphany
that drives them to support violence. And they rarely transform themselves from moderates one
day to radicals the next.’
42
Wiktorowicz’s study is not the only one to show that people do not join extremist or terrorist
groups easily; membership is preceded by a series of evolutionary events whereby emotions are
directed along a path hewn by the manner in which the individual experiences the socio-political
environment in which they exist. In short, emotion, including that shaping terrorist behaviour, is
inherently referential. Terrorists are not just angry, they are angry
at
something. Terrorists are
not just humiliated, they perceive themselves humiliated
by
something or someone. In this
sense, emotion is not merely a somatic reaction or reflex but a richly social occurrence in
which the concept of power, or more precisely the personal experience of power, lurks as an
ever present factor. This idea is by no means new in the study of human activity; in fact it
formed a key theme in the works of writers such as Spinoza. For Spinoza, those things that
we perceive as self-empowering bring us joy, while those things that we perceive as disempow-
ering bring us sadness.
43
Spinoza’s basic emotions of joy and sadness are affects which generate
a shift in a person’s ability, or perceived ability, to think and act freely. All other emotions,
Spinoza argues, are complex derivatives of joy and sadness which arise in response to percep-
tions of power.
44
In attempting to understand how the experience of joy and sadness is operationalised within
the terrorist group we can return to the insights into the pathology of violence offered by Waller.
Waller’s insights show how, under certain conditions, the inextricable relationship between
emotion and reason can be instrumentalised to create an irresistible compulsion towards violence
against one’s real or imagined enemy. In describing the genesis of this process Waller draws
together themes that are already scattered across the general area of terrorism studies but
which are rarely afforded deep analysis or inter-disciplinary review, especially with regard
to understanding emotion. This is unfortunate because the themes identified by Waller
(and others writing more deliberately in the field of terrorism studies, such as Horgan,
45
40
Quintan Wiktorowicz,
Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2005).
41
Catarina Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Secur-
ity’,
Political Psychology
25, no. 5 (2004): 741 – 67.
42
Wiktorowicz,
Radical Islam Rising
, 85.
43
See in particular Benedictus de Spinoza,
The Ethics
(London: Penguin Books, 1996), especially Part III.
44
See also Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza. Gilles Deleuze,
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
(San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1988), 27 – 8.
45
Horgan,
The Psychology of Terrorism.
94
D. Wright-Neville and D. Smith
Silke
46
and Moghaddam
47
) can help elucidate the complex interplay of cognitive and emotional
forces that can lead a person to choose violence as a preferred mode of political agency.
As set out by Waller
48
understanding how emotion can become instrumentalised and
turned into a motive for killing requires an examination of three particular aspects of human
agency as it relates to the formation of groups and their activities at the proximate level. To
be sure, it is also the case that without ultimate or precursory factors proximate violence is
less likely to occur. Or, put slightly differently, terrorist groups would be much less likely to
exist without their individual members experiencing social conditions that eventually primed
them for membership within a group.
49
But this is a separate issue and in the current environment
the reality is that such groups exist and a proximate threat is also present. Therefore, the remain-
der of this paper focuses on three interconnected aspects of emotion, political agency and
violence as they exist at the proximate level. Drawing on Waller’s conception of
professional
socialisation
,
group identification
and
peer pressure
it is possible to generate deeper understand-
ings of how some individuals are cognitively and emotionally drawn to violent political
behaviour.
Professional socialisation
refers to the institutionalised manner in which individuals are
socialised into a group context of cruelty towards ‘outsiders’ through the logic of an escalating
rage and a cognitive commitment to violence. The significance of the terrorist group is that it
provides a quasi-family environment that gives the terrorist a sense of emotional attachment
to others involved in the same struggle. Especially for individuals who experience feelings of
alienation, powerlessness and humiliation at the hands of a real or imagined enemy, membership
within the terrorist group provides a palliative and creates the conditions for a cathartic sense of
release. It does so by providing a clear link between how one actually feels and how one must
act. Alienation is replaced by identification with the group, powerlessness is replaced by potency
derived from being involved in group operations, while humiliation is mitigated by participation
in actions that are simultaneously justified in retaliatory and offensive military terms. As Silke
reminds us, most terrorists see themselves as soldiers in a just war, and to this extent the
emotional attachment of the terrorist to his or her group is existentially similar to that of a
soldier to his or her comrades while in combat.
50
This is an important point because it is
often the case that emotional bonds to the group are so strong that there occurs a blurring of
the distinction between the individual terrorist and their role in the society that they seek to rep-
resent. For Waller, this is encapsulated in the phenomenon whereby ‘rather than joining an
organization because it fulfills our needs, it is the organization that shapes our needs’.
51
That
is to say, once an individual is socialised into a context of rage, rage becomes an emotional
requirement of the individual. Furthermore, once this rage is cognitively connected to violence,
violence itself becomes a need.
52
Group identification
has for many years been the focus of a great deal of research in the
social sciences, but less common have been detailed investigations into how this process
works at the emotional level among terrorists. An important consequence of professional socia-
lisation is a greater propensity to embrace hostile views of outsiders. At the beginning the use of
46
Andrew Silke, ‘Becoming a Terrorist’.
47
Fathali Moghaddam, ‘The Staircase to Terrorism’,
American Psychologist
60, no. 2 (2005): 161 – 9.
48
Waller,
Becoming Evil
.
49
Silke, ‘Becoming a Terrorist’, 37 – 9.
50
Andrew Silke, ‘Courage in Dark Places: Reflections on Terrorist Psychology’,
Social Research
71, no. 1 (2004):
189 – 90.
51
Waller,
Becoming Evil
, 235.
52
This resonates with parts of the argument put forward by Franz Fanon in
The Wretched of the Earth
. However, while
Fanon makes a normative argument in favour of violence, we limit ourselves to an observation of
why
violence
becomes the preferred form of political agency for some people.
Global Change, Peace & Security
95
violence against out-group members might offer a salve to temporal grievances, but this is not to
say that it is easy to undertake. A complex process of de-individuation and the diffusion of
responsibility is needed to create an emotional framework in which killing can be subjectively
justified. It is this process that is often referred to as ‘becoming a terrorist’ – the progressive
emotional detachment from other human beings that the psychologist Albert Bandura referred
to as ‘moral disengagement’.
53
In short, moral disengagement is a critical catalyst for violence
against fellow human beings because, as Bandura notes, ‘people do not ordinarily engage in
reprehensible conduct until they have justified to themselves the rightness of their actions.
What is culpable can be made righteous through cognitive reconstrual’.
54
Once this process of self-justification begins, and reaches its climax in deadly forms of
violence, the act of killing itself tends to have a brutalising effect within the group. As in
conventional warfare, the horrors of the initial encounter risk becoming routine, and the
killing can become progressively easier.
55
If the spread of terrorist violence leads to counter-
terrorism responses from the state (or a coalition of states) that feed the sense of collective
anger and reinforce collective memories of brutalisation, an increasing number of
individuals become emotionally primed for recruitment or have their commitment to the
group strengthened.
Peer pressure
emphasises the importance of in-group dynamics in the shaping of violent
behaviours. The utility of this concept lies in its ability to analyse in-group dynamics from a
different analytical perspective. In particular, it focuses on the power of conformity and how,
within the group context, the need to be liked, accepted and respected by fellow in-group
members can become a powerful emotional influence. Fear of ostracism, of ridicule, or of
being charged with cowardice can exert a powerful emotional impact on individuals. Looked
at from a slightly different perspective, a fear of emotional abandonment can lead an individual
to regulate and censor their own behaviour in an attempt to protect the integrity, cohesiveness
and security of the group to which they belong. Importantly, this fear of being abandoned by
the group extends to the acceptance of violence as a legitimate political tool. This is because
any refusal to participate in violence, the questioning of its strategic utility, or arguing against
its morality, threatens to undermine the group’s
raison d’eˆtre
and is sure to lead to personal
expulsion or schisms within the group.
Concluding thoughts: implication for countering terrorism
More than a decade ago Albert Bandura and his colleagues warned that ‘the massive threats to
human welfare stem mainly from deliberate acts of principle rather than from unrestrained acts
of impulse’.
56
Yet the idea that terrorist violence in particular might be based on deeply held
convictions grounded in emotive responses to real or perceived injustice remains an unpopular
view, particularly in the public sphere. Similarly alien to many public narratives is any recog-
nition of the danger that the greater the perception of external threat, the more intense the
emotionally radicalising effects of Waller’s proximate causes –
socialisation, identification
and
peer pressure
– are likely to be. Even for those who are not part of the formal terrorist
group but who constitute the terrorists’ informal community of support, this is an important
concept. Feelings of kinship have long been recognised as an important trigger to violence. In
the past, it was the ability of the nation-state to foster notions of the ‘national family’ that
53
Albert Bandura et al., ‘Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency’,
Journal of Person-
ality and Social Psychology
71, no. 2 (1996): 364 – 74.
54
Ibid., 365.
55
See Dave Grossman,
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
(Boston: Little
Brown, 1995).
56
Bandura et al., ‘Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement’, 372.
96
D. Wright-Neville and D. Smith
was critical in rallying a population to war.
57
In the contemporary era, however, notions of
kinship have become increasingly complicated by the emergence of alternative loyalties not
predicated upon the romantic notion of the nation state.
58
Most obviously, the idea of the
ummah
, the global family of Muslims, has been used to tap into the emotional anxieties of
Muslims around the world. The key to this strategy has been the development of a set of narra-
tives that encourage individual Muslims to adopt a thoroughly modern conception of family –
one that defines family not just in terms of immediate blood ties but in terms of collective
memories and experiences.
The evolution of identity formation necessarily encroaches on the process of becoming a ter-
rorist, especially at the proximate level. In terms of professional socialisation, there is a need for
counter-terrorism practitioners to pay closer attention to the cognitive connection between anger
and violence and the role that feelings of fraternal anger play in this process. Ensuring that
counter-terrorism activities do not provide the emotive raw materials used to escalate in-
group cohesion can help interrupt the process whereby individuals are socialised into a group
culture predicated upon the demonisation of outsiders. In particular, avoiding human rights
abuses and any other activities that can contribute to feelings of community victimisation –
even if justified under the rubric of securing the nation – is especially important. Returning
to a theme touched upon earlier, terrorist organisers are especially adept at scouring the social
landscape for examples of victimisation and at using these to evoke emotive responses that
not only bind the terrorist group more tightly but also buttress their self-belief that they are fight-
ing on behalf of a wider oppressed community. In contrast, not only does denying the group any
empirical evidence of oppression undermine the cohesive power of shared anger, but it also
widens the gulf between the narratives of the terrorists and the real life experiences of those
they seek to inspire.
At the level of group identification the study of the role of emotion in facilitating political
rage points to the importance of providing alternative avenues for social affiliation and political
expression. Identity dynamics under conditions of late modernity have undermined the potency
of traditional approaches to building emotional attachments to the wider community. Therefore,
it is unreasonable in the contemporary era to predicate counter-terrorism strategies upon belli-
gerent reassertions of narrow definitions of national identity. Yet such has been the approach
of many Western governments in recent years; from the introduction of citizenship tests in
countries such as Australia and Britain to the banning of Muslim headscarves in France. But
such responses go against the flow of global forces and as such they are not only unsustainable
over the long run, but they also risk intensifying the experience of exclusion and alienation
among those unable or unwilling to meet the demand that they sacrifice core aspects of their
identity and embrace the cultural accoutrements of the dominant cultural group. There is a
need to build into counter-terrorism strategies initiatives that not only recognise the growing
complexity of identity but also accept difference as a virtue. In other words, there is a need to
develop initiatives that recognise the inevitability of multiple identities and which accept as
legitimate the expression of political views associated with one aspect of identity even when
they are at odds with mainstream views. In short, effective counter-terrorism cannot occur
without a widening of the democratic space, including facilitating greater capacity for the
peaceful expression of alternative political views.
Community-focused counter-terrorism initiatives designed to facilitate the deeper inte-
gration of marginal groups into society can also play a critically important role at the level of
57
See John L. Comaroff, ed.,
Perspectives on Nationalism and War
, International Studies in Global Change, 7
(London: Routledge, 1995).
58
See Ulrich Beck,
Power in the Global Age
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006); Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Reconnaissance
Wars of the Planetary Frontierland’,
Theory, Culture and Society
19, no. 4 (2002): 81 – 90.
Global Change, Peace & Security
97
peer pressure. In particular, initiatives that run counter to hostile stereotypes of the ‘out-group’
can create a sense of existential confusion within the terrorist group, which in turn can manifest
into a higher degree of moral ambiguity about violence. Greater moral ambiguity opens up the
possibility of schismatic debates within terrorist groups that can in turn be exploited by counter-
terrorism officials. By creating conditions for a bifurcation of emotional attachment such initiat-
ives undermine the ontological certainty of the terrorist group and by so doing weaken the power
of emotional attachment.
None of these initiatives are easy; in fact they run against the grain of conventional counter-
terrorism theory and practice which emphasises the use of hard over soft power. Moreover, such
initiatives require a whole-of-government approach. If the emotional fulcrum that sustains terror-
ist groups is to be undermined there is a need to include other government departments with
responsibilities as diverse as immigration, social services, employment, and sport and recreation
in the development and implementation of counter-terrorism policy. This will not be easy because
to date the challenge has been seized and is jealously guarded by police and security agencies. It
will also confront significant political hurdles in that focusing positively on the same communities
that terrorists claim to be representing risks inflaming the passions of those sections of the
community attracted to simplistic accounts of terrorism as a cultural or religious phenomenon
and who are therefore inclined to view such communities through a suspicious and even hostile
lens. But such obstacles will need to be addressed if we are to develop a sustainable long-term
strategy for managing the threat of terrorism.
Notes on contributors
Dr. David Wright-Neville
is Associate Professor of Politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry
and Co-Director of the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University. David has also worked as
a senior terrorism analyst in the Australian intelligence community. His research focuses on the political
psychology of violence, the processes of radicalisation in multiethnic societies, and counter-terrorism pol-
icies and practices.
Debra Smith
is a PhD candidate in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University and a
researcher in the Global Terrorism Research Centre. Her area of interest is on the nexus between human
emotions and the urge to violence.
98
D. Wright-Neville and D. Smith
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