terrorist decision making

terrorist decision making in the context of risk, attack planning, and attack commission

terrorists from a wide array of ideological influences and organisational structures consider security and risk on a continuous and rational basis. this article is interested in answering the following questions: what does the cost–benefit decision look like on a single operation? what does the planning process look like? how do terrorists choose between discrete targets? what emotions are felt during the planning and operational phases? what environmental cues are utilised in the decision-making process? fortunately, much insight is available from the wider criminological literature where studies often provide offender-oriented accounts of the crime commission process. we hypothesise similar factors take place in terrorist decision making and search for evidence within a body of terrorist autobiographies.

spatial decision making of terrorist target selection: introducing the track framework

guided by previous research and recent empirical analyses, this paper gives insight into elements that characterize the spatial decision making of terrorist target selection. five key factors explain why targets are chosen by terrorists. the authors propose that, generally, targets will be selected when they are tolerable, relevant, accessible, close and/or known. this is followed by a discussion of attacks witnessed between january 2013 and december 2018 in the united kingdom, and implications.

terrorists are just another type of criminal

terrorism studies began as a niche area of enquiry in the early 1970s within history, political science and sociology. such approaches explain the emergence of, and motivation for, politically violent campaigns within their socio-political context. the initial dominance of history and political science had a major path-dependent effect upon the study of terrorism. instead of viewing a terrorist attack as a single crime, the tendency within the literature has been to explain the attack in terms of a group’s ideological position or strategic orientation. terrorism studies, as a whole, are becoming increasingly more empirically and quantitatively oriented after years of questionable data and science. insights from crime science into why people engage in terrorist acts have been limited, to date, for a number of reasons. terrorists make cost–benefit decisions in much the same way as ordinary criminals. the field of crime prevention is testament to the vast potential for situationally focused crime-prevention approaches.