ABSTRACT
In the preponderance of statistical and quantitative data on the practice of terrorism and political violence, the individuals who participate in terrorist acts are often obscured. Some later achieve a certain fame or notoriety, either by virtue of the levels of violence which are attributed to them or by their apparent reinvention as non-violent political actors; arguably, however, the very exceptionality of these trajectories makes these life stories less helpful in strengthening our understanding of the broader, more generalised pattern of individual engagement with political violence, from initial radicalisation through to disengagement (and, in some cases, re-engagement). The focus on a relatively narrow cast of high-profile terrorist ‘villains’, a large part being driven by popular and media attention, results in a somewhat skewed picture; of equal value, arguably, is a more sustained reflection on the lives of lesser-known individuals. This book provides a series of in-depth individual portraits of people who have been at various junctures labelled as ‘terrorists’, exploring their journeys from radicalisation to mobilisation to activism to disengagement to, in some instances, reengagement. These case studies, ranging across geographical and historical locations, offer a further understanding of the range of human experiences that lie behind the rather blunt label of ‘terrorist’. The case studies follow a broadly chronological pattern, running from the late nineteenth-century Russian-inflected anarchist tradition to the Islamist extremism of the twenty-first century. In the intervening period, Irish republican and Zionist ethno-nationalism, anti-Nazi resistance, European extreme left-wing political violence, the American radical right, and Northern Irish loyalism are all explored here. To a certain extent, the case studies under consideration in this project encompass the ‘four waves’ of terrorism delineated by David Rapoport – anarchist, anti-colonial, new left and religious – and yet, as Rapoport concedes, this conceptualisation should not be interpreted too rigidly, with significant overlap between these categories.1 Moreover, there are some manifestations of political violence which do not appear to fit any of the ‘four waves’ – extreme right-wing ideologies, for example. Nevertheless, this study cautiously suggests that through an in-depth examination of the trajectories towards, within and away from political violence of a number of carefully-selected individuals, an understanding can emerge of some broader patterns which appear through the history of terrorism and
politically-motivated violence in the late nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These include the varying processes of radicalisation, the role of technology, the diverse methods of communication and propagandising, the importance of ideology as a binding mechanism in group affiliation, the significance of enemy actions – legal, political or military – in shaping the precise form political violence takes, and, above all, the personal idiosyncrasies which lie behind any decision to engage in political violence and which fundamentally determine the nature and effect of that engagement on the individuals under consideration.
