Sageman, Marc. "The Stagnation in Terrorism Research". Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol.26, No.4 (2014): 565-580.

Sageman, Marc. "The Stagnation in Terrorism Research". Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol.26, No.4 (2014): 565-580.

• Although research into the causes of terrorism certainly existed since the 1970s and 1980s (565), it greatly increased in scope and intensity after the 9/11 attacks (566).
• Much of the research that was produced after the 9/11 attacks sought to answer the public question of 'why do they hate us?', and was failed in this endeavor. A majority of this research has concentrated on Islam and has tried link the hatred of terrorist groups to specific ideas within the Quran (566-567).
• This explanation answered -- even if that answer was incorrect -- the question of why terrorists used violence. But it failed to answer the other question of why people joined this organization; why were most Muslims not terrorists if the hate was contained with the Quran (567).
• Intelligence agencies were convinced that at-risk youth were radicalized and convinced to join Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups by terrorist agents infiltrating mosques. Based on this theory, the US tried to hunt down Al-Qaeda recruiters at national mosques and Britain created programs to monitor at-risk Muslim youth (567).
• This initiative has been a failure, with the US failing to find a single active Al-Qaeda agent recruiting young Muslims at American mosques. Radicalization does not appear to occur this way. New theories have focused on radicalization through the internet or informal mosques and prayer groups (567).
• By the mid-2000s, the proliferation of terrorist attacks had demonstrated the scope of the problem and the fact that the majority of the attackers were homegrown terrorists who had been radicalized without exposure to foreign agents or travel to jihadist camps in other countries. This shifted the focus to how individuals became radicalized (568).
• Joining a terrorist group is usually a response to four factors: a perceived attack on one's group, the perception of massive injustice, resonance of a terrorist group's message with personal experience, and contact with a preexisting terrorist group (568).
• State efforts to fight terrorism had made personal contacts between terrorists more risky and disincentivized these kinds of tightly knit or hierarchical structures. Terrorists have had to switch to more internet-based programs and adopt leaderless structures that encourage attacks by individuals and small groups with minimal centralized planning (568).
• There also appears to have been a switch to self-radicalization, with many terrorists seeking out jihadist websites and literature because they were radical prior to viewing this material. Access to jihadist literature seems to reinforce rather than inspire jihadist views (569).
• Many European countries and some Asian countries have adopted counter-radicalization programs, designed to target at-risk with social programs and provide 'correct' interpretations of Islam to youth to discourage radicalization. There is no evidence that this programs work (568-569).
• Academia has largely failed to create a good basis of data on terrorism. Part of this reason is that very few scholars are entirely dedicated to the study of terrorism, with most trying -- and often failing -- to apply their own specialties to terrorism (569-570).
• The lack of publicly available information on terrorist organizations and terrorists creates another major barrier to producing quality research. Scholars have tried to make up this gap with depending on government statements, which are often heavily skewed, outright lies, or do not reveal extremely important information (569-571).
• Academic research on terrorism was suffered from the separation of academia from government work on this matter. Whereas Soviet studies scholars moved between government and academia during the Cold War, academics focusing on terrorism rarely move into government nor intelligence officials into academia. The lack of contact has allowed the deterioration of academic research into terrorism (572-573).
• The author believes that renewed connections between academia and government are the solution to producing a higher quality of research on terrorism (576).
• Without access to proper sources of information, academic scholarship on terrorism has been unable to meet traditional levels of professionalism and has been severely flawed, dependent on prejudice, or both (572).
• Research on terrorism by intelligence agencies suffers from both internal biases towards alarmist views that serve political ends and a massive amount of data that is not properly analyzed because of time constraints. This prevents these organizations from conduct the kinds of systematic studies that could produce meaningful breakthroughs in research (573-575).
• Most research that is conducted is done for political purposes in response to powers from outside the intelligence community and is merely an assembly of information confirming political claims, not a genuine inquiry into the topic (573).
• The alarmist bias within the intelligence community is driven by the need to cover their asses in the case of a terrorist attack. Nobody blames intelligence agencies for being too anal and obsessive, but they get a lot of flak if any attacks happen. It, therefore, makes sense for them to be as paranoid as possible (574).
• Since the factors that cause young people to move from holding radical beliefs to acting on those beliefs are not well understood, intelligence agencies tend to target all those found to hold radical beliefs. This means that sting operations often arrest and imprison youth who would not have moved to violence if they had not been urged to by authoritative secret agents pretending to be religious figures. These sting operations are therefore dubious on strategic and moral grounds (575).