What Makes a Terrorist? Muslims’ and non-Muslims’ Lay Perceptions of Risk Factors and Their Consequences for Counterterrorism Policy Support

Jonas R. Kunst, Milan Obaidi, Ann-Cathrin Coenen, Vilde D. Vasseljen and Paul Gill

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2023, vol. 35, issue 3, 634-657

Abstract: The question of why people become terrorists has preoccupied scholars and policy makers for decades. Yet, very little is known about how lay people perceive individuals at risk of becoming terrorists. In two studies conducted in the U.K., we aimed to fill this gap. Study 1 showed that Muslims and non-Muslims perceived a potential minority-group terrorist in terms of both structural (e.g., life-history, social) and individual risk factors (e.g., personality, psychopathology, ideology). In Study 2, Muslims and non-Muslims perceived a potential right-wing majority-group terrorist as having more individual predispositions to terrorism than a potential left-wing majority-group terrorist. Importantly, in both studies, individualist perceptions such as psychopathology were positively associated with support for stricter law enforcement, whereas structuralist perceptions such as adverse childhood experiences were positively associated with support for social interventions. Lay people seem to have multifactorial understandings of individuals at risk of becoming terrorists, which influence their counterterrorism policy support.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2021.1967149 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:35:y:2023:i:3:p:634-657

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2021.1967149

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().