TSAS WP18-02 ‘How “Alone” are Lone-Actors? Exploring the Ideological, Signaling, and Support Networks of Lone-Actor Terrorists’
The threat of lone-actor terrorism poses a unique challenge to security practitioners tasked with detecting, identifying, and preventing acts of ideologically and politically-motivated violence. Conventional knowledge and early academic work – …
TSAS WP17-06: ‘From nascent insurrections to full-blown insurgencies: Why some militant groups engage in sustained armed conflicts, a quantitative approach’
There is a growing threat from terrorism and insurgencies worldwide in recent years. It is puzzling why some initially weak militant groups, who face immense difficulties in garnering material resources – …
TSAS WP17-05: ‘Analysis of Low-Tech Terrorism in Western Democracies: Attacks with Vehicles, Blades and Incendiary Devices’
This study explores the issue of low-tech terrorism in Canada, France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom from 2001 through 2017. As a descriptive analysis, this study reveals – …
TSAS WP17-01: A Concurrent Evaluation of Threat Assessment Tools for the Individual Assessment of Terrorism
This research examines what is the content overlap among three tools that may be relevant for assessing an individual’s risk for terrorist violence: Version 3 of the Historical-Clinical-Risk Management—20 (HCR-20 – …
Security and Uncertainty in Contemporary Delayed-Return Cultures: Coping with the Blockage of Personal Goals
Threat and defense: From Anxiety to Approach
The social psychological literature on threat and defense is fragmented. Groups of researchers have focused on distinct threats, such as mortality, uncertainty, uncontrollability, or meaninglessness, and have developed separate theoretical – …
Anxious uncertainty and reactive approach motivation (RAM) for religious, idealistic, and lifestyle extremes
Neural Foundations of Meaning and Threat
Threat and defense as goal regulation: From implicit goal-conflict to anxious uncertainty, reactive approach motivation (RAM), and ideological extremism
Four studies investigated a goal regulation view of anxious uncertainty threat (Gray & McNaughton, 2000) and ideological defense. In all studies, participants (N = 444) were randomly assigned to have – …
Examining the Needs and Motivations of Canada’s Federally Incarcerated Radicalized Offenders
This study allowed for an enhanced understanding of the motivations and needs of radicalized offenders,Footnote 1 while providing the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) with further evidence that can be – …
Bridging the Barrier: Israeli Unilateral Disengagement
The construction of the barrier separating Israel from the West Bank has become the site of one of the most heated controversies the world over, the source of virulent propaganda, – …
Israel’s Relations with Egypt and Turkey during the Arab Spring
What implications do the uprisings in the Middle East in 2010–2011 hold for Israel’s foreign relations with the two most strategically prominent states in the region, Egypt and Turkey? The – …
Narratives and Counternarratives: Somali-Canadians on Recruitment as Foreign Fighters to Al-Shabaab
Using structured professional judgment guidelines in threat assessment and management: Presentation, analysis, and formulation of a case of serial intimate partner violence.
Retaliation in Dagestan: The Missing Link in the Mobilization Scheme
Social network analysis in the study of terrorism and political violence
Unintended Consequences of Neighbourhood Restructuring: Uncertainty, Disrupted Social Networks and Increased Fear of Violent Victimization Among Young Adults
Murder on the Tokyo Subway: Nerve Centres, Religion and Violence
Dynamiques de participation d’une bande armée dans des crimes de masse. Une etude de cas du genocide rwandais
Beating a Path to Salvation: Themes in the Reality of Religious Violence
Networks as Strategic Repertoires: Functional differentiation among Al-Shabaab terror cells
TSAS WP15-02: Terrorist Babble and the Limits of the Law: Assessing a Prospective Canadian Terrorism Glorification Offence
Since 2007, the Canadian government has repeatedly expressed interest in a terrorism “glorification” offence, responding to internet materials regarded by officials as terrorist propaganda and as promoting “radicalization”. In the – …
Risk assessment and management of group-based violence
Group-based violence (GBV) may be defined as actual, attempted, or threatened physical injury that is deliberate and nonconsensual, perpetrated by one or more individuals whose decisions and behaviour are influenced – …
Woolwich Attack: Managing Fear
Rise of Self-Defense Groups Highlights Mexico’s State-Level Security Challenges
The inhabitants of Michoacan, a state on Mexico’s Pacific coastline, must feel a grim sense of deja vu regarding recent developments surrounding organized crime-related violence in the region. Seven years – …
Religious Radicalization and Securitization in Canada and Beyond
In Religious Radicalization and Securitization in Canada and Beyond, Paul Bramadat and Lorne Dawson bring together contributors from a wide range of academic disciplines to examine the challenges created by – …
TSAS WP14-07: The Process of Radicalization: Right-Wing Skinheads in Quebec
This research studies the radicalization process of right-wing skinheads in the province of Quebec by identifying the mechanisms that shape pathways toward extremism and violence.
The Imaginations of Humanitarian Assistance: A Machete to Counter the Crazy Forest of Varying Trajectories
The United Nations cited the 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan as the largest humanitarian crisis in living memory. The environmental catastrophe effected twenty million people and highlighted the complicated relationship – …
Far-Right Lone Wolf Homicides in the United States
Relying on data from the Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), we comparatively examine characteristics of far-right homicides in the United States perpetrated by suspects with no evident affiliations with domestic terrorist – …
Growing Threat of European Fighters in Syria Highlights Need for EU Cooperation
Almost all European Union member states have seen some of their young citizens, often Muslims between the ages of 18-29, leave their countries to join the jihad against the Assad – …
Radicalization: A Prerequisite to Terrorism
North America has long served as a fundraising and logistics hub for dozens of global terrorist organizations and has occasionally been attacked. Many radicals have lived, worked or studied in – …
Home-Grown Islamist Radicalization in Canada: Using Survey Evidence to Model the Structure of Radical Attitudes
We designed a survey instrument to measure attitudes to issues widely believed to be relevant to radicalization and deployed it among Muslim communities in Ottawa. The results are remarkably inconsistent – …
Canada and the Arab Islamists: Plus ça change …
The Link Between Unemployment and Terrorism
Radicalization in North America: A Strategic Approach to Prevention
Impact and Ramifications: The Aftermath of the Aum Affair in the Japanese Religious Context
It is now seventeen years since the Tokyo subway attack that made Aum Shinrikyō and its leader Asahara Shōkō household names in Japan and beyond. The subway attack was swiftly – …
Globally Aum: The Aum Affair, Counterterrorism and Religion
Aum continues to feature in counterterrorism discourses and military training manuals, and continues to represent, for security services and policy makers, the “public face” of chemical and biologically oriented terrorism. – …
The 2012 National Elections in Papua New Guinea: Averting violence
The Chechen Memory of Deportation: from Recalling a Silenced Past to the Political Use of Public Memory
TSAS WP14-03: Right-wing Extremism in Canada
What factors may promote violent right-wing extremism in Canada, and how is it connected to similar movements in the US and Europe? What impacts might this violence have on radicalization – …
Voices of the ‘‘Caucasus Emirate’’: Mapping and Analyzing North Caucasus Insurgency Websites
This article looks at Internet use by insurgent groups in the North Caucasus in the context of a regional diffusion of violence. (Source: Publication).
Terrorism and Radicalization to Violence: Making Prevention Work
A Public Health Approach to Understanding and Preventing Violent Radicalization
Very recent acts of terrorism in the UK were perpetrated by ‘homegrown’, well educated young people, rather than by foreign Islamist groups; consequently, a process of violent radicalization was proposed – …
Terrorism is a Failed Brand
Opportunity Costs or Costly Opportunities? The Arab Spring, Osama Bin Laden, and Al-Qaeda’s African Affiliates
There is little doubt that Al-Qaeda faces twin challenges in the “Arab Spring” sweeping North Africa and the Middle East (MENA) and in the death of Osama bin Laden in – …
Why Global Jihad is Losing
Collective and State Violence in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: The Limits of Classical Rational-Choice Theory
A Vision of Crimes in the Future
“Cashberta:” Migration Experiences of Somali-Canadian Second Generation Youth in Canada
This paper examines the circumstances that have pushed Somali-Canadian male youth from Toronto to Alberta; a region with a growing and booming economy. (Source: Publication).