Understanding terrorism: A behavioral developmental approach

Abstract

Summary Countries, governments, and cultures must move through each of the behavioral-developmental stages of human development sequentially. It is hypothesized that each behavioral-developmental stage must be achieved, and failure to recognize this may be a major contributing factor to the rise of terrorism and crime in a society. In a war-like situation, an occupying country's attempts to have the conquered country skip behavioral-developmental stages will fail more often than not. This will possibly result in negative sentiment and terrorist behavior among those in the occupied country. Terrorism is an omnipresent condition worldwide. It is common for non-scholarly observers to not know that terrorist attack lethality is now extremely low. Terrorist attacks are often constituted by suicide bombings, which makes them relatively difficult and costly to perform. Remote controlled detonators already exist but they are not used in the Middle East. In the future, terrorists likely have access to not only biological weapons, but also small and easily transportable nuclear weapons which can be smuggled across the world. It is for these reasons that this article was written, to address these problems from an adult developmental perspective. An adult developmental perspective is useful for several reasons. One of the problems is that terrorists are not the same as conventional armies. They do not have a central location so conventional wars against them do not show the same promise. With the Internet and its successors, the difficulty to organize terrorist activities worldwide has decreased drastically. At the moment, many of the attacks are suicidal, but there is no reason to believe that is necessary given remote detonation devices are widely available. This article addresses the larger issue of how to manage and reduce conflict between terrorists and their targets. The approaches for the most part are based on adult behavioral-developmental stage theories. The history of the behavioral-developmental stage theory harks back to Piaget as well as Kohlberg and his students such as Kegan, Selman and Commons. The article provides a systematic framework for viewing many present suggestions that abound in the policy area. What is different is these authors provide a behavioral-developmental-stage diagnostic means for deciding what actions are appropriate for a society and a terrorist group at a given time.