Dominant predictors of violent versus non-violent terrorist roles among US Muslim converts

Abstract

ABSTRACT Terrorism is a diverse form of violence, and terrorists are also diverse in terms of their characteristics, motivations for participating, and the roles they take within terrorism. Though terrorism studies have mostly focused on developing broad theories of why people participate in terrorism in general, some scholars have advocated for research that tests specific, contextually bound hypotheses and a disaggregation of terrorism by its roles. This study explores which variables most strongly predict violent (i.e. active planning/commission of terrorist violence) versus non-violent (i.e. passive support) involvement in Islamist terrorism among US Muslim converts (N = 131). After rigorously coding open-source data, a dominance analysis indicated that three variables (out of hundreds) were the dominant predictors of whether a subject took on a violent versus non-violent role (V/N-V), accounting for 25% of variance in V/N-V. Subjects who had owned and/or trained with a weapon, were domestic (versus international) terrorists, and had publicly declared their extremist beliefs were significantly more likely to plan or perpetrate terrorist violence, whereas variables related to radicalization, socialization, and socio-demographics had no impact on V/N-V. These results reinforce that terrorism is not monolithic and that understanding antecedent and operational behaviors may hold the most utility for preventing terrorist violence.