Social exclusion in the lives of terrorists: An empirical analysis

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence and experimental studies have suggested that social exclusion might play a major role in the process of becoming a terrorist. However, there is a lack of systematic empirical data to support this claim. Therefore, in this work, we investigated whether exclusion is an incidence which occurs more frequently in the lives of terrorists. To provide an in-depth examination of this question, we performed three studies. We conducted interviews with terrorism experts and analyzed these data qualitatively (study 1) and coded qualitative data on terrorists from newspaper articles (study 2) and judicial decisions (study 3), which were analyzed quantitatively. Supporting our hypothesis, social exclusion revealed to accumulate in terrorist biographies. Moreover, we identified differences between right-wing and religiously motivated terrorists regarding the kinds of exclusion which occurred most prominently in their biographies: for right-wing terrorism, it was particularly personal exclusion due to the lack of a peer group and explicit rejection experiences; for religiously motivated terrorism, it was particularly grievance-based exclusion due to their sociocultural background and non-extremist criminality. All in all, these findings support previous theories and studies and corroborate the assumption that social exclusion is a frequent experience on the pathway toward terrorism.