ABSTRACT
Introduction The field of terrorism studies has grown exponentially since the events of September 11, 2001 (Horgan, 2005), though much of the research that has been published since then has been poor (Silke, 2001; 2003), generally due to the reliance on secondary data and a lack of researchers working in the field. Nonetheless, there has been a growing awareness of the complexity of the challenge faced in understanding the psychology and motivations of the terrorist (Victoroff, 2005) and an increasing appreciation of the routes and processes involved in people engaging in terrorism or becoming radicalized to the point of engaging in armed violence to bring about political change (Horgan, 2003; 2005) and to a lesser extent the changes that take place once the terrorist becomes involved (Burgess et al., 2007). However, until very recently (Bjorgo and Horgan, 2009; Horgan 2009a) there has been a dearth of research exploring the processes and factors involved in disengagement from terrorist activities.
