ABSTRACT
DESPITE THE interdisciplinary label attributed to terrorismresearch, conceptual development within its research efforts remain gravely limited. Psychological approaches to terrorism remain especially fraught, theoretically underdeveloped and, from the perspective of contemporary psychological research, even naïve.1 A basic lack of researchers plays a part in this,2 but a more obvious problem that plagues existing efforts results from an almost total reliance on secondary and tertiary source material to inform theoretical development. Martha Crenshaw recently reminded us that terrorism research efforts still lack an empirical foundation of ‘primary data based on interviews and life histories’ of those engaged in terrorism.3
