Lone Wolf Terrorism Research Articles

Machine Learning for Predicting Intent of Radical Action in Text Data

Many cases of radicalism, especially violent radicalism, manifest within the context of inter-ethnic conflict and war. Research in this domain has significantly contributed to our overarching comprehension of the issue. This form of radicalism is inherently linked to the dynamics of group affiliation. However, our focus here is directed towards the individual motivation driving radical actions. While radical actions may encompass dynamics of group affiliation (e.g., the most radical pro-life activists being members of the Army of God), they also possess a substantial individual component. For instance, numerous attacks on abortion doctors or clinics are categorized as ’lone-wolf terrorism’. In this study, we sought to examine whether state-of-the-art Machine Learning tech- nology for text analysis could effectively discern the intent behind radical actions from user-generated content. We analyzed a diverse array of radical texts published online by various activists, including anarchists, Iranian guerrilla members, Indian revolution- aries, activists from the US civil rights movement, and The Army of God. Our analysis reveals that Machine Learning models can successfully identify potential signals indica- tive of the author’s intent behind radical actions.

Poland as a Player in the Middle East in the First Two Decades of the 20th Century. Selected Military and Non-Military Dilemmas

This article aims to show that Poland’s foreign policy towards the Middle East is important, although not a priority in the pursuit of its interests. However, the significance of the Middle East in the Polish raison d’État has been increasing continuously and this trend will continue. Dilemmas related to the issue of military involvement in the region were among the most important for the Polish ruling class over the last three decades. Of equal importance were implications of the Arab Spring, the refugee crisis and the threats of lone wolf terrorist attacks. Also problematic was the position of Polish authorities regarding Iran, or rather the dilemmas connected with unthinking support for the United States in this matter, and the simultaneous cooling of relations with Tehran and the European Union’s states. The policy towards the Middle East is a derivative of the Euro-Atlantic direction, which has been a matter of priority to Poland. Presenting Poland as a loyal ally as regards policy towards the Middle East is an outcome of Polish elites’ endeavours to ensure security in Poland by strengthening the alliance with the USA and NATO, which are to constitute a security provider against the neo-imperial policy of Russia.

Supreme Gentlemen: The Path of Radicalization for the Incel Community’s Lone Wolves

ABSTRACT Several men committed mass violence in the past decade because they believed women were denying them the sex they felt they deserved. In the wake of their attacks, investigators found references to an online community known as Incels in their manifestoes and social media posts. Members of this community typically adhere to misogynistic beliefs that deny women their autonomy, deride sexually active men, and condone violence against both. Using Hamm and Spaaij’s lone-wolf radicalization model, this article argues that the most violent members of the Incel community engaged in lone-wolf terrorism based upon their grievances with women. Furthermore, this article suggests that the influential impact of misogyny as a political element can contribute to lone-wolf terrorism. Accounting for these aspects will require modifications to the radicalization model that include factors such as domestic violence and misogyny.

Foreshadowing Terror: Exploring the Time of Online Manifestos Prior to Lone Wolf Attacks

Previous research has highlighted the prominent behavior of lone wolf terrorists to produce and share a manifesto publicly, outlining their frustrations and motivations for their eventual terrorist attack. This article aims to explore this phenomenon, focusing on the timelapse between when a terrorist manifesto is posted online and when the eventual attack occurs, discussing the time difference between the two events for 12 cases of lone wolf terrorism. The results revealed that the average time lapse between when a manifesto was posted online and when the terrorist attack occurs is one hour, 43 min. Limitations and implications are discussed in detail.

Anders Behring Breivik. A case study of a far-right terrorist – a lone wolf (Part II)

In the second part of the article on the case of Anders Behring Breivik, the author answers the questions of whether the attack could have been prevented and what impact it had on public sentiment, the nature of the changes to internal security policy in Norway and the performance of the country’s security services. In addition, he analyses Breivik’s actions in terms of whether he meets the criteria of a lone wolf terrorist, as well as describing terrorist attacks prepared or carried out by his imitators.

Final countdown: Exploring time suspensions between lone-wolf terrorist manifestos and attacks

Final countdown: Exploring time suspensions between lone-wolf terrorist manifestos and attacks

Investigating the Phenomena of Women in Lone Wolf Terrorism in Indonesia

This study aims to investigate The phenomenon of increasing women's involvement in acts of terrorism, especially "lone wolf terrorism" lately needs special attention from policy makers. Women who so far seem far from violent, have in fact been involved in several cases of terrorism, even as "lone wolf terrorism". This study uses a qualitative method with a case study approach. The results showed that the first case of “lone wolf terrorism” in Indonesia occurred in 2021. The motivation of women to become terrorists is based on psychological and sociological aspects. Sociological level aspects include self-selected, self-radicalized and lone wolf terrorism. While the psychological aspects include: economic motives, justice motives, situational motives, social motives, superiority motives, and actualization motives.

Lone Wolf Terrorism Trends in Indonesia

In the past few years, lone wolf terrorism has become a trending topic in the world of terrorism. We look at various definitions and trends of lone wolf terrorism from previous literature. This research aims to determine if there is a trend in lone wolf terrorism in Indonesia. The profile of the attacker is categorized based on the attacker’s age, gender, marriage status, occupation, and education, while the attack is categorized based on the attack’s target, region, choice of weapon, survival, casualties, and ideology or motive. The data is presented as descriptive statistics of qualitative nominal data in pie charts, and the results are discussed and analyzed. It was found that lone wolf terrorists do not have a single profile, but there are trends found where the attackers are typically male, single, in the 20s to 30s, self-employed, and at least graduated high school. The attacks usually target police, are based on ISIS ideology, uses either sharp weapon or explosives, and does not result in death. The attacker also typically survives, and all the attacks happened in the island of Java, Indonesia

NILAI TASAWUF PESANTREN DAN TRADISI SYAWIR SEBAGAI STRATEGI CULTURAL PROTECTION DARI LONE-WOLF TERRORISM

AbstractThis article aims to present a fundamental element of pesantren culture which is considered capable of being a cultural strategy in responding to the shift in the modus operandi of terrorism which has reached the stage of lone-wolf terrorism. Pesantren education with the ethical values of Sufism that is owned places the kyai as a central figure who teaches the journey of life and is filled with metaphysical, cosmological, and psycho-religious doctrines which are expected to bring humans to perfection and life peace in total servitude to God through cleansing the heart of despicable qualities, adorn oneself with praiseworthy qualities and spread affection. The tarekat al-Ta'lim wa al-Ta'allum adopted makes pesantren focus on efforts to love science by learning and teaching as the highest position in life. Besides, the bahtsul masail method that is implemented in pesantren trains students to be able to accept differences of opinion as something natural. The three of them form a package of elements of the pesantren that are deeply rooted so that the pesantren and students indirectly have a strategy of resistance against extreme religious understanding.

Framework to Counter Lone Wolf Terrorist Activity via Web

Lone wolf is one of the most dangerous shape of terrorism as they are almost undetectable. Although lone wolf is almost untraceable, it is possible that they leave footprints while using internet. However, internet is primarily used to communicate ideology to potential lone wolf, and visitors of such internet sources or websites require technical expertise which is not very common. This enables lone wolf to operate effectively, staying in low profile till the time an opportunity does not offer itself. It has the most devastating effect on the morale of counter terrorist force and is also the most effective terrorist tool to spread fear in the hearts of populous.

Tracing the Cultural Background of Lone-Wolf Terrorism

The end of the Cold War, as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union, posed new greater challenges and risks for the “Global North.” Terrorism—doubtless—seems to be one of them. Over the recent years, and particularly after 9/11, terrorists changed the focus of their attacks. While classic terrorism targeted important persons such as politicians, chief police officers, or celebrities, modern terrorism planned attacks on leisure-spots spaces, tourist destinations, and lay-persons. This is particularly troublesome for policymakers (who are in charge of orchestrating all-pervading models to preserve homeland security) and for field-workers who are seriously punished when they are in contact with radicalized cells. For this reason, specialists traverse for many problems to understand the complexity of terrorism as well as the motivation of young lone-wolves to attack societies where they are native. The present conceptual research focuses not only on the borders of travel literature but also the colonial stereotypes forged during the European expansion to draw and model an “alterity” strictly limited to the ideals of the Enlightenment. In a nutshell, the allegories revolving around the “lone-wolf terrorism” continues the imprint of the “archetype of the noble savage” coined in 18th century.

Machine Learning Against Terrorism: How Big Data Collection and Analysis Influences the Privacy-Security Dilemma

Rapid advancements in machine learning techniques allow mass surveillance to be applied on larger scales and utilize more and more personal data. These developments demand reconsideration of the privacy-security dilemma, which describes the tradeoffs between national security interests and individual privacy concerns. By investigating mass surveillance techniques that use bulk data collection and machine learning algorithms, we show why these methods are unlikely to pinpoint terrorists in order to prevent attacks. The diverse characteristics of terrorist attacks—especially when considering lone-wolf terrorism—lead to irregular and isolated (digital) footprints. The irregularity of data affects the accuracy of machine learning algorithms and the mass surveillance that depends on them which can be explained by three kinds of known problems encountered in machine learning theory: class imbalance, the curse of dimensionality, and spurious correlations. Proponents of mass surveillance often invoke the distinction between collecting data and metadata, in which the latter is understood as a lesser breach of privacy. Their arguments commonly overlook the ambiguity in the definitions of data and metadata and ignore the ability of machine learning techniques to infer the former from the latter. Given the sparsity of datasets used for machine learning in counterterrorism and the privacy risks attendant with bulk data collection, policymakers and other relevant stakeholders should critically re-evaluate the likelihood of success of the algorithms and the collection of data on which they depend.

Internet connectivity and domestic terrorism in democracies

Through case study analyses a small body of research has focused on the role the internet plays in radicalizing potential lone wolf terrorists. However, scholars have yet to examine how internet connectivity influences terrorism cross-nationally. Thus, this project attempts to address that limitation. This paper examines the effect internet connectivity has on domestic terrorism in 80 democracies from 1992–2012. Using standard controls and multiple connectivity indicators, we find that greater connectivity is associated with increased domestic terrorism. However, the effects of internet connectivity on domestic terrorism are conditioned by levels of state wealth and domestic turmoil within democracies.

Entity and attribute extraction of terrorism event based on text corpus

Affected by complex international factors in recent years, terrorism events are increasingly rampant in many countries,thereby posing a great threat to the gloal community. In addition, with the widespread use of emerging technologies in military and commercial fields, terrorist organizations have begun to use emerging technologies to engage in destructive activities. As the Internet and information technology develop, terrorism has been rapidly spreading in cyberspace. Terrorist organizations have created terrorism websites, established multinational networks of terrorist organizations, released recruitment information and even conducted training activities through various mainstream websites with a worldwide reach. Compared with traditional terrorist activities, cyber terrorist activities have a greater degree of destructiveness. Cybercrime and cyber terrorism have become the most serious challenges for societies. Terrorist organizations take advantage of the Internet in rapid dissemination of extremism ideas, and develop a large number of terrorists and supporters around the world, especially in developed Western countries. Terrorist organizations even use the Internet anddark net networks to conduct terrorist training, and their activities are concealed. As a result, the lone wolf terrorist attacks in various countries have emerged in an endless stream, which is difficult to prevent. This study proposed a method of extracting entities and attributes of terrorist events based on semantic role analysis, and provided technical support for monitoring and predicting cyberspace terrorism activities. Firstly, a naive Bayesian text classification algorithm is used to identify terrorism events on the cleaned text corpus collected from the Anti-Terrorism Information Site of the Northwest University of Political Science and Law.The keyword extraction algorithm TF-IDF is adopted for constructing the terrorism vocabularies from the classified text corpus,combining natural language processing technology.Then,semantic role and syntactic dependency analyses are conducted to mine the attributive posttargeting relationship,the name//place name//organization,and the mediator-like relationship.Finally,regular expressions and constructed lexical terrorism-specific vocabularies are used to extract six entities and attributes(occurrence time,occurrence location,casualties,attack methods,weapon types and terrorist organizations)of terrorism event based on the four types of triad short texts.The F1 values of the six types of entity attribute extraction evaluation results exceeded 80%based on the experimental data of 4221 articles collected.Therefore,the method proposed has practical significance for maintaining social public safety because of the positive effect in monitoring and predicting cyberspace terrorism events.

IN IDEOLOGY: THERE IS NO LONE-WOLF TERRORISM

The lone-wolf terrorism phenomenon certainly becomes an interesting object, both for researchers and those related to law-enforcement interests. Lone-wolf terrorism is also called as a lone warrior or a single fighter or a single warrior. Realistically and empirically it is very reasonable to be called lone-wolf terrorism because there is no trace of the relationship between the perpetrators of lone-wolf terrorism and a terrorism organization. In the scrutiny and rational research there is no lone wolf terrorism, due to the existence of a very clear ideological relationship between a terrorism groups with Lone-wolf terrorism.

Terrorism as Socially Constructed Crime in Indonesia

In the aftermath of Bali Bombing 2002, which is considered the biggest terrorist attack in Indonesia, the Indonesian government launched the so-called ‘war against terrorism’. Subsequently, the government established and applied laws on terrorism and formed a special counter-terrorism police squad: The Detachment 88. A state body that coordinates counter-terrorism measures is quickly established, the National Anti-Terrorism Agency (BNPT –Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Terorisme). Therefore, terrorism in Indonesia has been considered a ‘big and serious business’ since 2002. It also raises a serious question in defining and judging terror crime. Indeed, Indonesia has the law of terrorism since 2002, yet the definition is not very clear. Even in international forum, there is no single and approved definition of terrorism. For instance, an armed group who attacked civilians in Central Sulawesi was named terrorists by the state. On the other hand, a group of militias who attacked and held hostages in Timika, Papua was labelled as an armed criminal group. In Jakarta, there were some bomb threats during 2015 and 2017. Nevertheless, the law enforcement agencies have never named them as ‘terrorists’, although their actions deserve to be called as ‘lone-wolf terrorism’. This paper aims to identify the social construction of terrorism. Terrorism is a term that is used regularly by news media and politicians. Whether its application is impartial or biased is fundamental to a debate. In a society where, international terrorism monopolizes news media and political discussion, there is no greater need than to analyze the boundaries of the term ‘terrorism’ construction within social processes. One of the serious problems involving terrorism in Indonesia is to define an offense as terrorism. The laws of terrorism are existed. The judgment and conviction to terrorism suspects also have been made in various jurisdictions. Yet, the types of offenses constituted as terrorism are still unclear. Ordinary people, media, opinion makers, and law enforcement officers have socially constructed terrorism and have their own perceptions of terrorism. This condition leads to law uncertainty and, to some extent, it leads to victimization and stigmatization of innocent people because their appearances and social environments have been associated to terrorism. This study employed two approaches: Social construction and guilt by association theories.

Lone Wolf Terrorism Through a Gendered Lens: Men Turning Violent or Violent Men Behaving Violently?

Lone wolf terrorists, who use bombs, firearms, knives, vehicles, biological weapons, or other means to kill and injure, sometimes inflicting mass casualties, are of increasing concern to governments, police, and security forces in Western countries around the globe. This article seeks to develop a more multi-dimensional framework for understanding these actors and the attacks they perpetrate by bringing the under-examined aspect of gender to the fore. The article contributes to the body of literature on lone wolf terrorism by centering gender as a means of analyzing this phenomenon. In particular, it looks to the current criminological scholarship on lone wolf terrorism, highlighting the lack of a developed gendered analysis. The article challenges misrepresentations of male violence against women in response to and in representations of lone wolf terrorists. It argues that the proliferation of these misunderstandings in policy, practice, and scholarship undermines efforts to understand and combat effectively lone wolf terrorism.

The Alphabet Bomber A Lone Wolf Terrorist Ahead of His Time, by Jeffrey D. Simon, PhD., Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, Imprint: Potomac Books, 2019.

The Alphabet Bomber A Lone Wolf Terrorist Ahead of His Time, by Jeffrey D. Simon, PhD., Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, Imprint: Potomac Books, 2019.

Recruitment and Incitement to Violence in the Islamic State’s Online Propaganda: Comparative Analysis of Dabiq and Rumiyah

This article attempts to fill a gap in research on the propaganda methods exploited in the Islamic State’s flagship online magazines, Dabiq and Rumiyah. Its major objective is to discover methods exploited by their editors either to convince readers to join the ranks of the Islamic State, or to partake in jihad in the form of violent actions against infidels. The article also attempts to understand the magazines’ modus operandi in terms of legitimizing the “Caliphate’s” violence against its enemies. In order to reach these goals, content analysis and comparative analysis were utilized. This article argues that while the legitimization of violence and call to violence was strongly emphasized in both magazines, there are significant differences in terms of recruitment messages. On the one hand, Dabiq prioritized this issue (e.g., through the promotion of hijrah). On the other hand, Rumiyah was much less interested in inciting followers to join its ranks in the Middle East. Instead, it focused on calling Ummah to participate in jihad against the infidels, especially in the form of lone-wolf terrorist attacks.

Lone Wolf Terrorism in Legislation: A Legal Overview

Lone Wolf Terrorism in Legislation: A Legal Overview