Scattered Attacks: The Collective Dynamics of Lone-Actor Terrorism

IF 4 1区 社会学 Q1 POLITICAL SCIENCE Perspectives on Politics Pub Date : 2023-12-11 DOI:10.1017/s1537592723002852
S. Malthaner, Francis O’Connor, Lasse Lindekilde
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Abstract

The proliferation of lone-actor terrorist attacks over the past decade has led to a rapidly expanding literature and a subfield of research. However, this research has only to a limited degree been brought into wider discussions on political violence and social movements. In the present article, we take up this synthetic challenge and argue the need to theorize the social and collective dynamics of lone-actor terrorism. The article proposes a novel analytical framework for understanding lone-actor terrorism. We provide a conceptualization that draws attention to the social embeddedness of terrorist lone-actor radicalization and the collective dynamic of lone-actor attacks. Our point of departure is the recurrent finding that lone-actor terrorists are in fact not that alone, and that their attacks tend to cluster in time and space. First, we propose to conceive of lone-actor radicalization as a relational pathway shaped by social ties and interactions with radical milieus/movements. Second, taking inspiration from Charles Tilly’s notion of “scattered attacks” as a pattern of dispersed, loosely coordinated collective violence, we suggest three complementary ways of analyzing these processes and their temporal and interactive dynamic. We argue that theorizing the social and collective dynamics of lone-actor political violence is not only about addressing an empirical puzzle (the abundance of social ties; the clustered pattern of violent attacks), but about analytically capturing an entirely different and potentially increasingly relevant logic of violent processes. Thereby, and paradoxically, the very notion of “lone actors” can help us to understand the social dynamics of collective political violence more generally.
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分散攻击:独行者恐怖主义的集体动力
过去十年来,单独行动的恐怖袭击事件激增,导致文献和研究子领域迅速扩大。然而,这些研究仅在有限的程度上被引入到有关政治暴力和社会运动的更广泛讨论中。在本文中,我们接受了这一综合挑战,并认为有必要对独行恐怖主义的社会和集体动态进行理论分析。文章提出了一个新的分析框架来理解独行恐怖主义。我们提供了一个概念化的方法,提请人们注意恐怖主义独行者激进化的社会嵌入性和独行者袭击的集体动力。我们的出发点是一个经常出现的发现,即独行恐怖分子事实上并不那么孤独,他们的袭击往往在时间和空间上聚集在一起。首先,我们建议将独行恐怖分子的激进化视为一种由社会关系以及与激进团体/运动的互动所形成的关系途径。其次,我们从查尔斯-蒂利(Charles Tilly)的 "分散攻击 "概念中汲取灵感,将其视为一种分散的、松散协调的集体暴力模式,并提出了分析这些过程及其时间和互动动态的三种互补方法。我们认为,对独行侠政治暴力的社会和集体动态进行理论分析,不仅是为了解决一个经验性难题(社会关系的丰富性;暴力袭击的集群模式),也是为了在分析中捕捉到一种完全不同的、潜在的、日益相关的暴力过程逻辑。因此,自相矛盾的是,"单独行动者 "这一概念本身可以帮助我们更广泛地理解集体政治暴力的社会动态。
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来源期刊
Perspectives on Politics
Perspectives on Politics POLITICAL SCIENCE-
CiteScore
6.00
自引率
5.30%
发文量
313
期刊介绍: Perspectives on Politics is a journal of broad interest to scholars across many fields, in addition to professional political scientists, political analysts, policy makers, and the informed public. Essays synthesize and extend significant research and developments in all dimensions of political science scholarship. In many cases, the journal aims to connect research findings, conceptual innovations, or theoretical developments to real problems of politics.
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