‘I Did My Bit’: Terrorism, Tarde and the Vehicle Ramming Attack as an Imitative Event

Abstract

This paper charts the rise in prevalence of ramming attacks and how this wave of attacks challenges many of the assumptions and approaches we have about terrorism, its causes, and policies to address it. Such approaches tend to concentrate on either the ‘psychology’ of individual terrorists, or wider structural issues, such as religious ideology and the role of terrorist organisations in converting and recruiting people to violence. This paper will take a different approach, one which focusses less on structure and individual psychology, and more on the act itself, as something that is not merely an expression of an individual or an ideology, but something that has a lure and force of its own, as something that travels through our contemporary mediascape, to be internalised and imitated by an increasingly varied set of subjects with varying motivations, psychologies, ideologies and circumstances.