ABSTRACT
Despite the increased attention paid to understanding terrorism since the events of 11 September 2001 (or 9/11), psychological perspectives on terrorism remain underdeveloped. In many ways, what might explain this are issues that have hindered conceptual progress in terrorism research more generally. The 9/11 attacks, like many major terrorist incidents before them, revealed significant gaps in our understanding of terrorism, with some of the most basic questions remaining without useful answers. A reason for the persistence of such gaps might relate to unresolved practical issues (e.g. the fact that a paucity of reliable data exists on all but the most well-researched terrorist groups, the fact that the number of dedicated terrorism researchers has shown no discernable increase in the long-term – interest tends to drop significantly in the time following major terrorist events – and problems of access to activists) that have resulted in an unsatisfactory state of affairs which has persisted since 2001: analyses of terrorism continue to mix fact and fiction, and remain short-term, incident driven, politicised and narrowly focused, with little overall sense of conceptual grounding or theoretical continuation.
