ABSTRACT
Since September 11, 2001 many Americans, along with others around the world, have been preoccupied with the why of what happened. We wonder how Islamists could kill themselves and innocent people, believing they are doing this in the name of God. But terrorism is not new and exists everywhere. The radicalism of the late 1960s spawned its own terrorist movement, the Weather Underground. More recently the Unabomber—a lone individual with a history of mental illness— carried out successful terrorist operations and eluded capture over a period of many years. We saw another example in Oklahoma City in 1997. Terrorists have come from religious fundamentalist organizations, social protest groups, and radical political movements, both of the left and the right. Although many of the terrorists have been poor and uneducated, others have come from affluent, privileged circumstances. The fact that nearly all are late adolescents or young adults (or started their terrorist careers during this phase of their lives) raises the question as to whether there is something about youth that makes the lure of an ideology that promises a perfect society, together with the prospect of the violent overthrow of the existing world order, irresistible. If there is, can anything be done about it? This chapter is an attempt to explore this question and its implications.
