Terrorist Typologies: a review

09 Feb 2011

Even before 9/11, terrorism had been studied by psychologists seeking to discover who turns to terrorism, why and how.  But since the 9/11 attacks, a wealth of research on why people become terrorists has been conducted and published.   Psychiatry professor Walter Reich has stated that terrorism cannot be understood exclusively in psychological terms; one must also give weight to socio-political conditions and religious beliefs.  However, any human behaviour, be it commerce, politics or terrorism stems, at its heart, from psychology. The nature of terrorism does not always allow for comprehensive analysis of personality types involved, early life experience, motivations and pre-meditating factors.  With suicide terrorists, one must rely on testimony and anecdotal evidence from family and friends as to who that person was and why they sacrificed their life in the name of a cause.  

Insanity?

Many people try to label individuals who commit heinous acts as suffering from psychopathology.  This term refers to mental illness, not ‘the science’ of being a psychopath (which is not a clinical term)!  How much easier would it be to accept 9/11 if we could say wholeheartedly that the hijackers were a group of deranged ‘psychopaths’ who just happened to have found each other in life and that they represent a small minority of people who are suffering from severe mental health issues.  Indeed, there will be some people who engage in terrorism who are suffering a psychiatric or psychological disorder, but that is not the case for every terrorist, be it ‘conventional’ terrorist or suicide bomber.  They are in fact ‘normal’ (in the clinical sense of the word) human beings who have committed mass murder.  We can label them as evil, callous, fundamentalist, misguided, atrocious, but we must accept that the majority are not suffering from psychopathology. What is not normal is their behaviour; it is not the norm to murder someone, or people on a large scale, especially in a high impact fashion.  Something has driven them to commit these acts, so we must ask, are there certain personalities or personality traits that make people more vulnerable to such behaviour, when exposed to certain environments and experiences? MORE ONLINE

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