Letter from the Editor

Abstract

Dear Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict Readers: Welcome to the twelfth volume, second issue of the Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict: Pathways toward Terrorism and Genocide Journal. I will start this letter with a brief overview of the four articles in this Issue, followed by a solicitation for ideas to be included in our 2020 Special Issue. I conclude with a farewell to Assistant Editor Steven Windisch. We have four exceptional articles to share with you in this Issue. In addition to illustrating the scope of the Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict Journal through a diverse array of ideological groups, from the far-right to far-left extremism, Volume 12 Issue 2 articles use a host of analytic techniques and datasets to provide empirical support. For example, Laura Faragó, Anna Kende, and Péter Krekó relied on computer-assisted personal interviews to examine the social psychological mechanisms of justifying intergroup violence against symbolically or physically threatening outgroups. Using structural equation modeling, the authors found that right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) was a much stronger predictor of the justification of intergroup violence against both physically and symbolically threatening groups than a propensity for radical action. These findings highlight that RWA justifies politically motivated aggression against different target groups in Hungary. In another study, Michael K. Logan and Margeret Hall relied on Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to identify psychologically-relevant patterns of language use – with a focus on affect and emotions, cognitive function, and pronoun usage used in communiqués associated with the earth and animal liberation movement between 2013 and 2017. The authors pay specific attention to differences in communiqués associated with different criminal events such as arson, animal liberation, sabotage, and vandalism and compared the communiqué data to a collection of lone actor terrorist’s writings. The results suggest that there were linguistic differences across crime types and relative to the lone-actor writing sample. In addition to examining extremism from the individual-level, this issue also considers group-level processes – for example, Victor Asal, Lindsay Heger, and Douglas M. Stinnett investigate why some organizations representing ethnic minorities receive outside diplomatic support from intergovernmental organizations in the Middle East from 1980 to 2004. The authors explore both normative principles and practical concerns that have the most influence and support for ethnopolitical organizations. Although the analysis finds evidence for both the normative and strategic views, the authors found that the variables associated with the strategic view have a larger substantive effect on the probability of support. Given the importance of this topic in the present counterterrorism environment, the Editorial Board selected this as the feature article on Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict Journal’s website, meaning that readers may access it DYNAMICS OF ASYMMETRIC CONFLICT 2019, VOL. 12, NO. 2, 111–112 https://doi.org/10.1080/17467586.2019.1622278