1. How do lone actor terrorists emotionally manage to perform violence in highly confrontational attacks?
2. Project Description
Despite numerous high-profile terrorist attacks committed by individuals operating independently from terrorist groups, little academic attention has been given to exploring how these lone actor terrorists can emotionally perform violent acts against other people.
Microsociological analyses of antagonistic situations between one or more people have demonstrated that violence is emotionally difficult and stressful for individuals to engage in. Randall Collins conceptualises this difficulty as a barrier of “confrontational tension and fear” that individuals must pass through to engage in violent acts against other people. Passage through or mitigation of this barrier is enabled through a number of different situational factors, such as attacking weak victims, remote forms of attack, the co-presence of a support group or clandestine violence.
These factors may be absent in many lone wolf terrorist attacks. In the context of an attack, lone actor terrorists are isolated individuals performing violence against (often) many other people. This is an …show more content…
For my project, I use a modified version of the Countering Lone-Actor Terrorism project’s consensus definition of lone actor terrorism: The threat of use of violence by a single, ideologically motivated perpetrator who aims to influence a wider audience, acting without direct support in the planning, preparation, and execution of a terrorist attack. Since my project focuses on the situational contexts of lone actor violence, less emphasis is placed on control-and-command links for individual terrorists. This allows me to capture the widest range of incidents possible, without compromising on possible relevant situational factors for an individual engaged in
2. Project Description
Despite numerous high-profile terrorist attacks committed by individuals operating independently from terrorist groups, little academic attention has been given to exploring how these lone actor terrorists can emotionally perform violent acts against other people.
Microsociological analyses of antagonistic situations between one or more people have demonstrated that violence is emotionally difficult and stressful for individuals to engage in. Randall Collins conceptualises this difficulty as a barrier of “confrontational tension and fear” that individuals must pass through to engage in violent acts against other people. Passage through or mitigation of this barrier is enabled through a number of different situational factors, such as attacking weak victims, remote forms of attack, the co-presence of a support group or clandestine violence.
These factors may be absent in many lone wolf terrorist attacks. In the context of an attack, lone actor terrorists are isolated individuals performing violence against (often) many other people. This is an …show more content…
For my project, I use a modified version of the Countering Lone-Actor Terrorism project’s consensus definition of lone actor terrorism: The threat of use of violence by a single, ideologically motivated perpetrator who aims to influence a wider audience, acting without direct support in the planning, preparation, and execution of a terrorist attack. Since my project focuses on the situational contexts of lone actor violence, less emphasis is placed on control-and-command links for individual terrorists. This allows me to capture the widest range of incidents possible, without compromising on possible relevant situational factors for an individual engaged in