ABSTRACT
Introduction The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City on September 11, 2001 (9/11) signalled a step-change in the world of terrorist research, resulting in attempts to develop comprehensive, flexible psychological, sociological and political theories capable of explaining terrorist behaviour in a number of different cultures and settings. Despite this apparent ‘step change’, terrorism was still primarily understood by the Western world in terms of a threat originating outside Western borders (Danieli et al. 2005; Taylor and Horgan 2006; Rogers, Loewenthal et al. 2007). The Madrid bombings of March 11, 2004 did little to alter this conception. More recently, the London bombings of 2005, the attempted London/Glasgow bombings of 2007, and White convert Nicky Reilly’s detonation of a bomb in a restaurant in Exeter (UK) in 2008 cast a shadow of doubt over the level of certainty that the threat of terrorism did, indeed, originate from outside our borders in the minds of policy makers and members of the public, alike. As a result, involvement in terrorism has increasingly been seen in terms of a radicalisation process with the potential to occur within Western borders. Following from the analysis in the preceding chapter by Randy Borum, this chapter aims to provide a summary of our understanding of the motivation for joining an extremist group or taking part in terrorist activities, followed by an account of the current understanding of the process of radicalisation. The author will re-visit the question of why individuals are drawn to terrorist groups before exploring recent empirical evidence targeted at understanding how the process of radicalisation is believed to occur.
