ABSTRACT
Much of this book has dealt with how and why individuals and organizations engage in terrorism. We have at times also mentioned instances where individuals or organizations stopped their terrorist activities. Indeed, it was a point made from the very beginning that neither individuals nor organizations are terrorist by nature and that this is an activity that can be taken up for a variety of reasons, or abandoned for others. The theories on individual disengagement can also be regarded through the three lenses we have introduced in this book: deterministic, intentional, and relational. The kinds of explanations we find in the literature are largely the reverse of the explanations for involvement, however, there are also a series of theories which are specific to disengagement. The reference works we discuss deal with both exit from terrorism, and from ‘extremism’ and extremist violence (such as hate crime); the latter is considered in the context of terrorism from the perspective of the more recent approach to counter-terrorism as a matter of counter-radicalization. This chapter introduces these after a discussion of concepts and ends with a discussion of counter-radicalization and de-radicalization policies.
