The Terrorist Next Door: Can You Tell if Your Neighbor is a Terrorist?

摘要

Terrorism is a widely studied subject, particularly since the attacks in the United States on 9/11. Much of the study of terrorism is also closely tied to counter-terrorism study and analysis. The literature highlights what is typically known about characterizing terrorists: that the behavior of terrorists (and also criminals) is most often captured in psychological terms. Such psychological characteristics are normally unavailable to an observer and would not likely be usable as a means for identifying individuals of interest. In addition, such characteristics may be problematic because of the potential for influence by the subjective opinion of the observer. A study of the literature seeking common characteristics for terrorists found that there is really no special set of characteristics that can be used to uniquely distinguish a terrorist from a non-terrorist. Some interesting work in pure sociology and related approaches explore the circumstances, environment, and non-psychological aspects of defining a situation (definition in social space) that is focused on conditions for a terrorist event versus the identification of the individual terrorist. The representation of such conditions could contribute to modeling such behaviors. This paper summarizes a review of the literature on this topic and provides some thoughts on where the focus for finding terrorist suspects might be.