Future direction of terrorism research
A metadata search of state-of-the-art of terrorism research trends reveals a fairly siloed investigative and research approach to the field, that tends to be professionalised and specific fitting broadly within military, national security, and intelligence, justice, and policing paradigms. Moreover, research tends to be split between academic, practitioner and policy orientated domains. Then there are the divisions between the natural and social sciences. As such experts does not normally stray outside of their fields of expertise and research paradigms, which is self-limiting for advancing a progressive more holistic terrorism research framework, whether it is based on groups, lone actors, nationalist or social movements. A more integrated multidisciplinary approach to extremism, radicalisation and terrorism offers a ‘system approach’ to develop a deeper epistemic and theoretical understanding of terrorism with regards to not only the, What? But the root cause Why? And How? Questions. The purpose being to develop value for money, resource deployment efficiency and operationally effective counter measures, as everything in the world is interconnected in some way between the individual, group, and the environment so to fail to join the dots inevitably results in knowledge gaps and strategic vulnerabilities. Terrorism research in the West tends to be ‘event reactive’ to a large extent which results in surges of government funding, resource allocations and interest from the research community. Therefore, many researchers and professionals from disciplines outside of terrorism tend to periodically come out of the woodwork when there is a need to work within the parameters of a pre-defined research frameworks set by government agenda. This situation perhaps loses sight of the benefits of looking more broadly and deeply within their own specialist fields and collaborating with experts in other specialist fields.
A multidisciplinary approach to terrorism research elucidates how the fields of philosophy raises the important questions about human nature and how humans interact with the political and social environment they create. Humans share a common physiology, but their minds are influenced by innate drives and the natural environment that constructs cultural, political structures that changes and affects behaviours at a base unit of analysis being the individual. Therefore, these forces of nature and the environment need to be understood not in isolation, but how everything around the social ecology works together as a functioning organism. An integrated approach to terrorism research is therefore essential incorporating several fields of study. For example, when studying the human as a functioning organism, studying only one part of the anatomy such as the heart, brain or central nervous system in isolation, gives only one part of the whole picture. All parts of the anatomy working together creates the human being and if we are to understand how the human functions, we need to understand how all the parts of the human work together as being both nomothetic and ideographically interdependent. In this regard, the sciences of sociology can reflect of how groups influence each other and interact within the societies they create. The fields of psychology and social psychology helps us to understand how and why grievances are formed, and how the emotional and cognitive processes might lead individuals to actively seek out and interact with groups to further ideological causes. Psychopathology helps us to understand how experience and disposition causes individuals and groups to channel their needs for significance, airing grievances of injustice and to rebalance states of disturbed homeostasis caused by cognitive dissonance, all of which fuelled by powerful idiosyncratic emotions and cognitive processes of reasoning, behind which are complex neuro and chemical processes taking place.
Moreover, Anthropology helps us to understand the role of ethnography where artifacts, symbolism and semiotics and language form identities, individually and collectively with mainstream societies, closed communities, and subcultures. By exploring thematic research within areas such as music, artistic expression, and even clothing conventions which individuals adopt and adapt to form and express their identity. Psychological research has something important to say about conflict and terrorism as a method of political expression, but existing knowledge should be applied where we are not reinventing the wheel. Terrorism has been investigated within the psychological domain for decades since the early 70s with the Red Army (RAF) and Baader Meinhof, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel here, but perhaps it’s more a case of understanding how terrorism psychology is integrated and shares commonality with other fields of research such as ; epidemiology, political science, criminology, health science which is the most revealing. Also, the fields of neuro psychology and psychobiology helps us to better understand the neurological as well as the social processes we all go through in making decisions and how decisions are formed, rationalised, and followed through into actions. Then there are opportunities in game theory such as political and security dilemmas and economics to help us understand the forces of self-interest, empathy and collaboration in decision making processes based on mathematical formulas and computer algorithms developed by Peter Von Neuman in 1947.
Discovering patterns and commonalities through the philosophical and scientific fields of research will help us understand how we as humans interact and react to the world. Within the area of CT this helps us to identify and mitigate opportunities for pernicious groups to legitimise violence and exploit grievances within disaffected individuals, as well as identify how they select situational targets and methods of expressing psychological messaging through instrumental violence. There is no naivety assumed here that a state of peace and harmony can ever exist in the world, as individuals, communities and Nation States will always seek power over each other and compete for resources and status, that is a natural state of conflict for mankind. However, to unpack and analyse as many dynamics and forces as possible and attempt to understand how factors all work together can provide clear advantages in forecasting and predicting events and actions beyond what we presently have in the terrorism analytical toolkit. At the heart of intelligence are predictions and uncertainty, failure and knowledge gaps. An integrated multidisciplinary approach to terrorism research and analysis has the benefit of developing political, security and enforcement counter measures to help the intelligence community to anticipate the actions of hostile actors. Furthermore, it helps to foresee the methods they might employ to strike terror and commit violence against those they perceive as enemies or at worst existential threats. The traditional methods of physical violence are being replaced with social and economic disruption in the domains of cyber-attacks. This is where innovations in the areas of cyber security and artificial intelligence research and agent-based modelling will be essential and require more of a presence in the domain of counter terrorism research.