Kunst, JR;
Obaidi, M;
Coenen, AC;
Vasseljen, VD;
Gill, P;
(2021)
What Makes a Terrorist? Muslims’ and non-Muslims’ Lay Perceptions of Risk Factors and Their Consequences for Counter-terrorism Policy Support.
Terrorism and Political Violence
10.1080/09546553.2021.1967149.
(In press).
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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 counter-terrorism policy support.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | What Makes a Terrorist? Muslims’ and non-Muslims’ Lay Perceptions of Risk Factors and Their Consequences for Counter-terrorism Policy Support |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/09546553.2021.1967149 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2021.1967149 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
| Keywords: | Law enforcement, psychopathology, policy support, social interventions, terrorism |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Security and Crime Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10138720 |
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