An Initial Study on Radicalization Risk Factors: Towards an Assessment Software Tool

Abstract

Radicalization has increasingly become a transnational risk as cyber-technologies and social networks have steadily improved in the past years. DAESH has utilized the benefits of these new technologies to radicalize and recruit home-grown fighters, inviting them to join their ranks in the Islamic State territories, or inciting them to attack in their Western countries. However, this process of radicalization is not a simple task. Jihadist recruiters take advantage of certain vulnerable individuals who are better targets for radicalization. Academics have subsequently attempted to identify and examine these characteristics, which can be useful in identifying people who may be vulnerable to jihadist rhetoric. Violence risk assessment is a method which has been used by psychologists, Law Enforcement Agencies, prosecutors and other relevant actors, in order to assess the risk of an individual to commit violent acts. As terrorist or political violence is not comparable with other types of violence, specialized tools are needed to calculate the risk of radicalization or attack threat. This paper tries to gather the risk factors associated with violent extremism and jihadist radicalization from the literature and the risk assessment tools already available or under development. This paper presents some details related to the RiskTrack software tool, which is currently under development by behavioral researchers and computer engineers. The RiskTrack software tool aims to automatically assess an individual's risk of becoming radicalized. This is done by analyzing social media profiles and testing for specific factors that have been found to be associated with radicalization.