Potential Terrorist Research Articles

A Lone Wolf vs. an Affiliated Terrorist

The global terrorism database (GTD) shows that 3.5% of the total terror attacks across the world between 1970 to 2019 were targeted at tourists. A terror attack can be perpetrated by either a lone wolf or an affiliated terrorist. The analysis of the GTD conducted in this study shows that a terror attack targeted at tourists is 4.3 times more likely to have been perpetrated by a lone wolf than by affiliated terrorists. Since lone wolves operate individually, this finding implies that access control measures at tourist centers must regard individuals such as hawkers, newspaper vendors, freelance journalists, etc. who come around to do various businesses around tourists as potential terrorists until proven otherwise. Since lone wolves do not work for a terror group, tourist attraction centers located in the regions, territories, and countries with no presence of terror groups must not relax their counterterrorism control measures under the impression that they are safe from terror attacks.

From Munich to Christchurch: International Sport and the Threat of Terrorism

The 1972 Munich Olympic Games is remembered for the terrorist attack which resulted in 11 members of the Israeli team being killed. It highlighted that sporting events and teams can be targeted by terrorists due to the high media profile that major sporting events attract. Since this time, high level security has been an important organising consideration for the Olympic Games, something that has increased since the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001. Other sporting teams, namely the Togo national football team and the Sri Lanka national cricket team, have likewise been targeted. The international aspect of many sports requires extensive touring to other countries, and this has resulted in various touring teams being in places that have been terrorist targets, as the New Zealand national cricket team experienced in Pakistan. New Zealand is not a region of the world prone to terrorism problems, but the March 15 attack on a Christchurch mosque could have led to loss of life amongst the touring Bangladesh national cricket team. No region or country is free from potential terrorist attacks involving sporting teams.

Disaster Response-A Global Concern: Are You Prepared to Care for Victims of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Attacks?

The threat of bioterrorism is increasing in lethality and numbers of events globally. Weapons of mass destruction include devices of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear origin and are often selected by terrorists because they are capable of causing widespread destruction, harm, and panic. Emergency personnel are often first to recognize and report potential terrorist activities. It is essential that emergency personnel maintain a high index of suspicion for symptom patterns that correspond with effects of bioterrorism agents. Health care providers must have a solid understanding of personal protective equipment for specific categories of bioterrorism agents to protect themselves and others while providing care to victims in the emergency department. A clear understanding of disaster protocols, established communication systems, reporting requirements, and available resources to aid in patient management following a bioterrorism event is crucial for optimal, safe, quality care to be administered.

New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims ed. by Kazim Ali

Reviewed by: New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims ed. by Kazim Ali Lopamudra Basu New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims Ed. Kazim Ali Pasadena, California. Red Hen. 2021. 368 pages. IN HIS INTRODUCTION to New Moons, a collection of poetry, fiction, and lyrical memoirs by Muslims in North America, Kazim Ali confesses the difficulty of embarking on an anthology that seeks to represent collective Muslim identity. He declares "it is hard to say what a 'Muslim' is," because there is such an enormous diversity of Muslim religious and cultural practices, ranging not only in fidelity to religious observances but also variations stemming from geographic locations, cultural and linguistic formations, as well as branches within the religion. Ali shares his own heritage as Shia Muslim, a sect that traces its origins from the Prophet's daughter Fatima, his son-in-law, and the imams rather than the more majoritarian Sunni sect that follows the caliphs. For Ali, the heterogeneity of Islam is not a modern phenomenon but something that has co-existed with Islam's very inception. The writings showcased in the anthology bear testimony to this vitality and variety of Muslim life. Although writers come from distinctive geographic areas, they share the experiences of immigration to North America, the loss of their homeland, and feelings of continuing cultural dislocation in their new homeland. Samina Hadi-Tabassum's short story "Maqbool" and Naazish Yar Khan's "Lost in Translation between Delhi and Chicago" represent South Asian Muslim families seeking to belong not only in their new neighborhoods in North America but also struggling to establish intimacy among spouses who have grown up in different milieus. Marital conflict, exacerbated by the pressures of immigration, is at the heart of several narratives, including Nour Naas's "Mother(land)" and Leila Christine Nadir's "Cold War." While many of the works in the anthology highlight tensions arising from the collision of old traditions with the new landscape of North America, many authors recapture earlier mid-twentieth-century movements of partition, violence, and ensuing statelessness. Palestine is a recurrent traumatic wound in the Arab world, and it finds expression in Mandy Fessenden Brauer's essay "Memories of Palestine During the First Intifada" as well as Noor Hindi's "On Language and Mourning." The devastation of the Indian Partition and the Muslim refugees who poured into the newly formed state of Pakistan is a generational trauma that echoes in Faisal Mohyuddin's poems "Ghazal for the Diaspora" and "Song of Myself as a Tomorrow" and in Sham-E-Ali Nayeem's "Partition Story." While the end of British colonial rule in the Middle East and India created cataclysmic impacts on the lives and dislocations of Muslim subjects, a more recent catastrophe that undergirds this volume is 9/11 and its continuing effects on North American Muslim identity. Hilal Isler's "Never Forget," Haroon Moghul's "Quebec Was the Semi-Colon," and Tanzila Ahmed's "Muslimah Fight Club" emphasize the profound shift in Muslim life and identity after the towers fell and the new surveillance mechanisms cast all Muslims as potential terrorists. This regime of surveillance is exacerbated in the Trump era with the Muslim ban prompting protests as depicted in Serena W. Lin's "People Here Love You." Islamophobia and systemic racialization of religion find a parallel in the transformation of secular India into an authoritarian Hindu state with the erosion of protections for minorities. This is poignantly evoked in Zara Chowdhary's "Slow Violence," in the portrayal of the destruction of her father's career in a rapidly Hindu fundamentalist regime of Gujarat. In the face of these geopolitical realities of Islamophobia, the War on Terror in North America, and a resurgent Hindu nationalism in India, this volume also documents the campaigns of ordinary Muslims in North America to claim more personal rights, whether it is the expression of their sexualities in Lamya H's "How to De-queer Your Apartment" or Uzma Aslam Khan's memoir "Stealth Christian, Stealth Muslim," which explores young women's friendships across religious barriers in a Pakistan rapidly losing its secular ethos. The act of drinking vodka in a cathedral becomes a protest against the...

Metabolic Effects of Sodium Fluorocitrate and Potential Treatments on Saccharomyces Cerevisiae: Changes in Oxygen Consumption

Sodium fluoroacetate (1080) is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, water‐soluble metabolic poison. In the body, fluoroacetate is converted to fluorocitrate (FC) which blocks the citric acid cycle and drastically decreases ATP production. Symptoms of exposure include nausea, vomiting, abdominal pains, salivation, irrational fear, weakness, tachypnea, cyanosis, sweating, increased temperature, and death. Signs and symptoms of 1080 poisoning are nonspecific, further complicating the diagnosis. 1080 is tightly regulated within the United States, but it is commonly used in Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, and Israel as a rodenticide to control invasive and predatory species. An eco‐terrorist scare in New Zealand (2015) and findings reported by the CIA (2007) have led 1080 to being identified as a potential terrorist weapon.To identify potential countermeasures against 1080 poisoning, a Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast) model was selected to assess the impact of FC on cellular respiration and to screen candidate therapeutics. In response to FC, yeast showed depressed mitochondrial activity as measured by oxygen consumption rate (OCR). Potential treatments, thonzonium bromide, nifuroxazide, pyrvinium pamoate, menadione, mefloquine, clemastine fumarate, bisacodyl, L‐ascorbic acid, thiethylperazine and vinpocitine, were examined in this study. All treatments are approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Toxicity of each treatment was also assessed.Assays were performed in yeast extract peptone galactose media, a metabolically restrictive media. To assess the effect of FC on OCR, cells were exposed to 50 µM, 100 µM, and 200 µM FC in liquid culture for 1, 4, or 24 hours. After incubation, mitochondrial respiration was assessed via the MitoXpress assay (Agilent), a fluorescence‐based assay that measures OCR. Once established as a viable model, yeasts were then used to screen therapeutics to improve cellular respiration. Yeast was co‐incubated with fluorocitrate (200 µM), and potential treatments at three increasing concentrations for 4 hours and the effects on mitochondrial respiration were assessed via the MitoXpress assay.Following the decreased OCR in yeast exposed to FC, 6 of the 10 treatments successfully restored the mitochondrial function of yeast as demonstrated by an increase in OCR. As a result, the compounds nifuroxazide, pyrvinium pamoate, vinpocitine, clemastine fumarate, bisacodyl, and L‐ascorbic acid are moving forward for further testing in cardiomyocytes and hepatic spheroids, with potential in vivo assessment, to characterize their effectiveness against 1080 poisoning. Future studies will continue to use yeast as a valuable screening method to identify other potential treatments for sodium fluoroacetate.

Natural disasters and their impact on cooperation against a common enemy

We develop a simple game theoretic model to study the impact of a natural disaster on the coordination of defensive efforts by a target state (G) and an ally (A) in relation to the choice to stage an attack by a terrorist (T), to examine how the realization of a natural disaster can impact strategic choices in such a setting. We focus on “long term impacts” in which a natural disaster increases costs of defensive efforts for G. When costs for G are higher in this way, the optimal choice by A to provide assistance or not and the ultimate optimal choice by T to attack or not could be altered. For all possible parameter values, a unique Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium for the specified sequential move game is identified. A comparative statics analysis is conducted to determine how the natural disaster could alter the equilibrium outcome with respect to: (i) whether A chooses to provide assistance or not and (ii) whether T chooses to stage an attack or not. We show that for a natural disaster of sufficiently small magnitude, we could possibly realize one of two distinct counter-intuitive outcomes in which a natural disaster leads to: (i) A not providing assistance which otherwise would have been provided or (ii) T not staging an attack which otherwise would have been staged. That is, after a natural disaster occurs, it could be that (i) the ally of the target of a potential terrorist attack is less likely to provide defensive support or (ii) a terrorist attack is less likely to be launched.

Studying while Muslim: anti-discrimination law, countering violent extremism, and suspect youth

ABSTRACT As part of the global War on Terror, governments, including in Australia, have increasingly encouraged teachers to spot students ‘at risk’ of radicalisation, thereby turning schools into sites of surveillance. Despite their important intended goal, these programs have been criticised for leading to over-reporting, misinterpretation, and the stigmatisation of Muslim students who have been disproportionately affected by such surveillance practices. In a climate of Islamophobic suspicion that constructs Muslims as ‘potential terrorists’, such outcomes are not surprising, leaving young Muslims vulnerable to discrimination and stereotyping. This article provides a critical reading of Complainant 201822 v Australian Capital Territory (Represented by the Education Directorate) concerning a young Muslim student who was wrongly reported by his school to public authorities due to his supposedly suspicious behaviour. Using the decision as a case study, the article discusses how young Australian Muslims have been caught in a vicious cycle in which anti-terror laws, policing, and surveillance foster their stereotyping as ‘potential terrorists’. At the same time, the decision illustrates how the law offers little protection against the significant harms caused by this manifestation of systemic Islamophobia.

NORTHERN SEA ROUTE: CLASSIFICATION OF EMERGENCY SITUATIONS

The purpose of the work is to study the theoretical problem concerning the completeness of the classification of emergency situations in relation to maritime spaces in the Arctic zone, and to develop on this basis scientific proposals for improving Russian legislation. The relevance of the chosen topic is predetermined by the increasing importance of the Northern Sea Route as a global transport communication in the face of the possibility of occurrence in the Arctic as a result of climate change and anthropogenic impact of events that entail catastrophic environmental consequences, the formation of global risks for the economy, population, environment and state security. The relevance of the proposed materials is due to the implementation of large-scale economic and environmental projects by Russia, the provision of defense and security, the sea transportation of hydrocarbons, and potential terrorist threats. The classification of situations serves as the basis for management decisions on rescuing people at sea, protecting the environment and eliminating oil spills in difficult environmental conditions. Classification as a method of scientific knowledge correlates with the goals of its application, which determines its scientific and practical significance in this work. As a result of the analysis of regulatory legal acts and scientific publications, the author identified a gap in the classification of emergencies at sea and substantiated the conclusion that it is necessary to develop a proposal to fill it by improving legislation.

Alienation as one of the causes of the emergence and existence of terrorism in modern society

At the edge of the 2000s, terrorism finally turned into a global threat to human development. In search of the causes that give rise to this phenomenon, researchers come to the conclusion about the influence of alienation processes on the encouragement of this dangerous phenomenon to life. The removal of alienation in the general social plan is of paramount importance in the fight against terrorism. It is necessary to pay untiring attention to the social education of the younger generation and the creation of a well-functioning multi-level education system (general, professional and additional). High-quality upbringing and education of a person will allow it to be formed as tolerant, law-abiding and humane. By paying more attention to the upbringing of the younger generation today, the state and society, thereby, reduce the number of potential terrorists of tomorrow.

EU’S NEW APPROACH TO THE STRATEGY CENTRAL ASIA – AFGHANISTAN

The article examines new aspects of the EU’s strategy towards Afghanistan – Central Asia aimed at stabilizing the region as a whole. New elements of the EU’s strategy towards Central Asia are connected with the EU desire to modernize it with the aim to assure synchronous stabilization of Afghanistan and the states of Central Asia in the context of negative repercussions of the Afghan crisis. The article underlines the view of some experts that Central Asia and Afghanistan have common interests in maintaining security and stability in the region as well as in developing mutually advantageous cooperation covering both Central Asia and Afghanistan. Based on these premises the EU tries to integrate Afghanistan into political dialogue between EU and Central Asia as well as into EU’s regional projects. In this context the EU considers as a matter of priority a transition to a trilateral model of political and economic cooperation in the format EU – Central Asia – Afghanistan on the basis of regional connectivity. According to the author, stabilization of Afghanistan and Central Asia will be heavily dependent on the ability of the EU as the largest western donor to Afghanistan to revive the Afghan economy in a speedy manner and to provide effective development assistance for post conflict reconstruction of the country. Special attention was devoted to research on EU’s policy on humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan in the context of reducing challenges to the EU’ security stemming from potential largescale irregular migration, terrorism and narcotraffic. The article envisages that the EU further development assistance to Afghanistan would be more related to the concept of the EU’s strategic autonomy.

"This is a political movement, friend": Why "incels" support violence.

How do members of extremist groups think about violence conducted by individual members on the group's behalf? We examine the link between extremism-motivated violence and extremist groups through a case study of misogynist incels, a primarily online community of men who lament their lack of sexual success with women. To learn how misogynist incels talk about mass violence committed by members of their group, we conduct a qualitative content analysis of 3,658 comments relating to the 2018 Toronto van attack, in which self-declared incel Alek Minassian drove a van into pedestrians, killing 10 and injuring 16. We find overwhelming support among self-proclaimed incels for the attack and violence more generally. Incels viewed mass violence as instrumental, serving the following four main purposes: garnering increased attention, exacting revenge, reinforcing masculinity, and generating political change. Our findings indicate the need to examine misogynist incels as a potential terrorist group and male supremacism as a basis for terrorism.

Prediction of Extremist Behaviour and Suicide Bombing from Terrorism Contents Using Supervised Learning

This study proposes an architecture for the prediction of extremist human behaviour from projected suicide bombings. By linking ‘dots’ of police data comprising scattered information of people, groups, logistics, locations, communication, and spatiotemporal characters on different social media groups, the proposed architecture will spawn beneficial information. This useful information will, in turn, help the police both in predicting potential terrorist events and in investigating previous events. Furthermore, this architecture will aid in the identification of criminals and their associates and handlers. Terrorism is psychological warfare, which, in the broadest sense, can be defined as the utilisation of deliberate violence for economic, political or religious purposes. In this study, a supervised learning-based approach was adopted to develop the proposed architecture. The dataset was prepared from the suicide bomb blast data of Pakistan obtained from the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP). As the proposed architecture was simulated, the supervised learning-based classifiers naïve Bayes and Hoeffding Tree reached 72.17% accuracy. One of the additional benefits this study offers is the ability to predict the target audience of potential suicide bomb blasts, which may be used to eliminate future threats or, at least, minimise the number of casualties and other property losses.

Canada’s and Russia’s Security and Defence Strategies in the Arctic: A Comparative Analysis

This comparative article reveals how the general focus of Canadian and Russian threat perceptions in the Arctic have shifted from a Cold War fixation on hard defence to accommodate soft security issues over the last three decades. Both countries now pay greater attention to threats and challenges stemming from climate change, security, and safety risks associated with resource development and increasingly accessible sea routes. Although concern about military conflict arising from Arctic disputes continues to frame some media discussions in both countries, most strategic analysts and academics have moved away from this line of argument. Instead, military functions now include assertion of Canadian and Russian sovereignty over their respective internal waters, as well as protection of resources in their exclusive economic zones and on and in extended continental shelves; protection of economic interests in the North, including mineral and bio-resources; prevention of potential terrorist attacks against critical industrial and state infrastructure; and dual-use functions, such as search and rescue operations, surveillance of air and maritime spaces, support to safe navigation, and mitigation of natural and human-made catastrophes. The authors argue that analysts should parse two forms of military modernization in the Arctic: one of capability development related to the global strategic balance, where the Arctic serves as a bastion or a thoroughfare; and a second intended to address emerging non-traditional security challenges. They contend that these modernization programs do not inherently upset the Arctic military balance and need not provoke a regional arms race.

The Use of Social Media to Spread IED’s and its Potential Terrorism Threat in Indonesia

The ease of access to social media makes it easier for people to receive information about radicalism, bomb-making and violence. Radicalism is the embryo of terrorism. In Indonesia, most radical acts of terrorism are generally carried out by bombing including suicide bombings. Through social media, radical groups recruit and also study the manufacture of Improvised Explosive Device (IED) bombs. This study aims to examine the misuse of social media in radicalization using IED and formulate efforts to deny it. In this paper the method used is a qualitative method with literature study techniques. Qualitative methods are used to be able to describe the research topic in a more explorative. In this study it will explain about the internet as a base for the spread of terrorism, terrorism and the act of blasting or bombing and the process of making IEDs on the internet channel. The results of this study show that social media is abused by radical groups in carrying out their mission. The purpose of radical groups in the action of radicalism on social media includes propaganda purposes to increase the existence of the group and understand radicalism, recruit members and run training and teach ways of violence including the manufacture of IEDs. In an effort to counteract the impact of the threat of radicalism through social media, several efforts can be made, among others, deradicalization, cyber patrol to block access to social media content that contains elements of radicalism, provide literacy to the public about safe social media and be wiser in receiving radicalism information.

Faces of security. Radicalization of prisoners as a challenge for the future of security of the Polish penitentiary institutions

An issue that is essential to contemporary society is the question of state security and personal safety of the citizens. Therefore, the state has to deal with one of the most important threats, i.e. radicalization. The phenomenon of home-grown radicalism is known in Western European countries. The phenomenon of radicalization should not be identified solely with contemporary domestic Islamic terrorism. Radicalism is not limited to one ideology. The question about the process of acquiring extremist beliefs is one of the most important for political scientists, political psychologists, sociologists and criminologists. Wanting to deal with the etiology of the decision about a terrorist attack, the focus should be on the moment when potential terrorists start and undergo the process of radicalization. The article aims to signal the problem of radicalization in Polish penitentiary units. The authors do not provide the knowledge necessary to counteract this phenomenon in penitentiary units. However, they point to the definition problems, the theoretical model of radicalization, the place of radicalization in the European Union's policy. They also present the penitentiary unit as a place susceptible to radicalization. They formulate general remarks on combating radicalization among prisoners. They inform that the Prison Service should not be left alone in counteracting the radicalization of prisoners. It is an element of the state security system. It also cooperates with other entities in the rehabilitation of prisoners. The authors acknowledge that the way to prevent the negative effects of the radicalization process of prisoners is first of all training personnel in this field. It is also the fundamental issue to isolate prisoners who are a source of danger. In this area, the authors suggest that if the radical attitudes of prisoners are intensified, it is worth considering introducing legislative solutions facilitating faster and adequate operation of prison staff in such cases.

Refugee Policies and Narratives in the Globalised Era

One of the effects of globalisation has been population mobility as a result of famine, climate warming and war conflicts, among other things. This flow of refugees, however, is often seen as a menace to the rule of law and human rights concomitant with the Western lifestyle. Refugees are no longer regarded as human beings and victims, but rather as danger, even as potential terrorists, which has led many governments, including the Australian, to detain them indefinitely in detention centres where they are confined in inhuman conditions. The main aim of this paper will be to describe Australian immigration policies and how contemporary Australian narratives on and by refugees are reflecting this situation, mainly by analysing a selection of texts from three recently published collections, namely, A Country Too Far (2013), They Cannot Take the Sky (2017) and Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark (2017), and Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018).

Street Culture Meets Extremism: How Muslims Involved in Street Life and Crime Oppose Jihadism

AbstractMany studies have examined why individuals with a background in street life and crime are drawn toward extremism. This paper examines why most people with this background reject extremism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, we found that Muslims involved in street culture were generally opposed to jihadism because they perceived jihadists as evil people who harm innocents; bad Muslims who defame Islam; and cowards who break the ‘code of the street.’ This opposition resulted in avoidance behaviours, criticism and, sometimes, violence against suspected jihadists. We argue that research on the crime-terror nexus has focussed too narrowly on the similarities between street culture and jihadism, contributing to a distorted image of Muslims involved in street culture as potential terrorists.

Resettling Afghan and Iraqi interpreters employed by Western armies: The Contradictions of the Migration–Security Nexus

This article develops a novel analytical framework for capturing the multiple, competing configurations that the migration-security nexus invokes in discourse and practice, combining insights from critical migration and security scholarship. The framework’s application is illustrated with an empirical case study of the protection and relocation of Afghan and Iraqi former local interpreters and other locally employed civilians working for Western armies. The analysis demonstrates that locally employed civilians (LECs) are simultaneously considered security actors in the East and security risks in the West, the ‘best and brightest’ causing brain drain and potential terrorists when crossing borders, both ‘model migrants’ and threats to western values. By uncovering the nexus’s multiple configurations and its contradictions, the framework supports the project of denaturalizing the migration-security nexus, while also showing that the discourses and practices justified through its various configurations include the legitimation of border violence and the denial of protection to migrants.

Adversarial Patrolling in a Uniform

Many of us will have seen uniformed guards patrolling in museums, airports, and other places where thefts or attacks are possible. In other similar places, we may have been unaware of undercover agents carrying out similar patrols. The latter type of patrollers has been modeled in recent literature. However, when the patroller is visible (wears a uniform), the potential thief or terrorist may be able to spot him when he is nearby and to time his theft appropriately. For example, the thief may wait a specified time after the uniformed patroller leaves his area. In “The Uniformed Patroller Game,” Steve Alpern, Paul Chleboun, Stamatios Katsikas, and Kyle Y. Lin study the effect on the patrolling game of having a visible (uniformed) patroller. It turns out that putting a uniform on the patroller greatly reduces his effectiveness in intercepting thefts or attacks. Of course, the visibility of a uniform may act as a deterrent to having the theft take place at all.

What Makes a Terrorist? Muslims’ and non-Muslims’ Lay Perceptions of Risk Factors and Their Consequences for Counterterrorism Policy Support

ABSTRACT The question of why people become terrorists has preoccupied scholars and policy makers for decades. Yet, very little is known about how lay people perceive individuals at risk of becoming terrorists. In two studies conducted in the U.K., we aimed to fill this gap. Study 1 showed that Muslims and non-Muslims perceived a potential minority-group terrorist in terms of both structural (e.g., life-history, social) and individual risk factors (e.g., personality, psychopathology, ideology). In Study 2, Muslims and non-Muslims perceived a potential right-wing majority-group terrorist as having more individual predispositions to terrorism than a potential left-wing majority-group terrorist. Importantly, in both studies, individualist perceptions such as psychopathology were positively associated with support for stricter law enforcement, whereas structuralist perceptions such as adverse childhood experiences were positively associated with support for social interventions. Lay people seem to have multifactorial understandings of individuals at risk of becoming terrorists, which influence their counterterrorism policy support.