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What if the 2002 movie Minority Report was real? What if we could identify someone about to commit a crime and stop them beforehand? Terrorism research tends to focus on the same thing. If we could figure out who the terrorists are or who they are likely to be, wouldn’t it be nice if we could stop them before they did it?
Unfortunately, there are no simple answers to the questions of what causes terrorism and what causes somebody to become a suicide bomber. There isn’t one pathway to becoming a terrorist.
These were just some of the points Dr. Allen R. Dyer made during his November 21, 2024, talk, Terrorism and Terror Management Theory, as part of the International Forensic Psychiatry Lecture Series. (You can watch a recording of the lecture online.)
Terrorism is politically motivated violence and intimidation by nonstate actors with questionable political authority. It holds a special criminal status because it threatens citizens. It uses violence to achieve a political end by creating an atmosphere of fear, insecurity, and mistrust.
Risk Factors for Radicalization
Dr. Dyer discussed several of his journal articles, co-authored with Philip J. Candilis, Sean D. Cleary, and Najat Khalifa.
The first study he shared was a cross-sectional study of 160 people convicted of terrorism offences and serving time in a Baghdad prison. The researchers compared them with 65 people convicted of murder and 87 people without any convictions. Semi-structured interviews covered multiple aspects, including demographics, family background, and adverse childhood experiences. They also examined attitudes toward the root causes of terrorism and traits associated with conduct disorder and antisocial personality disorder.
The research showed people convicted of terrorism were more likely to have a history of childhood disobedience, conduct disorder, and destructive behaviour. They were also more likely to justify terrorism for things like poverty, oppression, and group affiliation.
Types of Terrorists
Another article used latent class analysis and found three terrorism subgroups. (Latent class analysis finds hidden groups in a larger population without knowing how many groups exist or what makes them different.) The researcher examined common social, family, childhood, ideology, and personality factors.
The first subgroup (40.6 per cent) consisted of non-religious nationalists, while the second (40.0 per cent) were private apologists — those defending their religious beliefs. The third (19.4 per cent) were aggrieved people with antisocial personality disorders.
Pathways to Terrorism
Unfortunately, research has not found a single cause or pathway to radicalization. Another of Dr. Dyer’s co-authored research articles showed that engaging in terrorist acts is dependent on interacting personal, religious, and socioeconomic factors. The diagram he presented showed the severity of terrorism behaviour being directly connected to the guiding principles of religion (including religious commitment) and attitudes toward terrorism (including political commitment). There are also links to conduct disorder, and antisocial personality disorder, but not age, employment status or urban residence.
Alternate theories of terrorism include toxic masculinity (anti-feminist men with masculine insecurity acting out in destructive ways), Cheshire cat theory (“we’re all made here” or gaslighting), hapless victim, hapless perpetrator theory (being forced to wear a suicide vest), and terror management theory.
Terror Management Theory
Dr. Dyer cited two foundational books for terror management theory: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (1971) and The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski (1991).
The theory is based on people’s awareness that we will all eventually die — potentially at any time — which terrifies us. Because our self-esteem and cultural worldview can reduce that fear, we try to give our lives meaning.
Unfortunately, the first half of this decade has been filled with existential threats, including the pandemic, democratic erosion, and rising authoritarian leadership. Other challenges include the spread of misinformation (mistaken information) and disinformation (deliberately false information), artificial intelligence, economic instability, food insecurity, wars, immigration, climate change, and more.
Terror management theory helps people cope with existential threats through meaning and beliefs, religion, culture, and worldview. It also provides a sense of immortality—literally (afterlife), symbolically (one’s work continues), or collectively (nationalism or religious nationalism).
“As psychiatrists, we appreciate that to cope with unpleasant realities, we must balance emotion with reason and look for global solutions that benefit everyone, not privilege one group at the expense of another,” Dr. Dyer said.
In Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, he provides 20 instructions on how to combat the rise of tyranny, including defending institutions, remembering professional ethics, believing in the truth, not obeying without thought, being calm when the unthinkable happens, being wary of paramilitaries, and making eye contact and small talk.
Written by Virginia St-Denis and approved by Dr. Allen R. Dyer.
