POLICY CONSIDERATIONS IN COMBATING TERRORISM: DECISIONs regarding Right Wing risk and UNCERTAINTY
Author(s): Michele L. Malvesti west point
The Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point is pleased to announce a new release as part of its Occasional Paper Series entitled “Policy Considerations in Combating Terrorism: Decision-Making Under Conditions of Risk and Uncertainty,” by CTC Senior Fellow Michele L. Malvesti.
This paper examines radicalization as a social phenomenon through the behavior of individuals and networks. Violent extremists, individuals pursuing political change through violence, remain committed to striking the U.S. homeland and its interests abroad. It is important to understand how radical ideas spread to counter or contain this immediate and persistent threat. This study argues that the spread of violent extremism cannot be fully understood as an ideological or social phenomenon, but must be viewed as a process that integrates the two forces in a coevolutionary manner. The same forces that make an ideology appealing to some aggrieved group of people are not necessarily the same factors that promote its transfer through social networks of self-interested human beings. This means that there is value in differentiating why radical ideologies resonate among individuals, and how individuals come to adopt and advocate those ideas. This report helps contextualize the current terrorist threat, the role of technology in radicalization, and next steps in decoding radicalization.
The full report is comprehensive -- as you would expect from West Point, and you can download the PDF File With This Link
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| Mil.Counter Terrorism, Justice Dept and FBI don't see one |
Lastly, the fundamentalist stream, which includes mainly Christian Identity groups ... fuse religious fundamentalism with traditional white supremacy and racial tendencies, thus promoting ideas of nativism, exclusionism, and racial superiority through a unique interpretation of religious texts that focuses on division of humanity according to primordial attributes. ~ West Point
