Why terrorism arise

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X Sign up for our newsletter Please enter your email address below; Sign up for our newsletter. Over time, grainy, homespun propaganda images transformed into spectacular, Hollywood-style exercises in terror PR which could be instantly shared with a global audience of supporters.

But despite the presence of such imagery in western news coverage, media reports often failed to include detailed explanations for why terrorists sought to adopt violent tactics. Findings indicate that western media typically omit the political dimension of terrorist propaganda videos, but retain the more threatening, often exotic, aspects. This has resulted in the conflation of Islam and Muslims with terrorism in much news coverage.

While not always negative in tone, media reports indicate a thematic focus on terrorism, violent extremism and the cultural difference of Muslims. But despite a fascination with Islamic terrorism, the Global Terrorism Index reminds us that only 2. The vast majority of such attacks tend to be motivated by ethno-nationalist causes, rather than Islamist.

These patterns yield large families in which younger siblings in particular are likely to suffer from lack of parental investment of resources and emotional care. Such societies have few resources to devote to education, so their high numbers of young people cannot be trained to participate in advanced economic activities. It is hard for such countries to guarantee employment for their youth, who experience high rates of unemployment, engage in criminal activity or gang violence, or must otherwise migrate to the richer countries, where they work in low-level jobs.

Such poor countries are also often obliged to spend substantial sums on police control and national defense against neighboring poor countries, in which they employ local youth in low-level military jobs. The ratio of children to workers in the Muslim world is very high, especially because there are so few women in the labor force, so the actual ratios of children to workers are almost double the child to adult ratio.

Some research suggests that later-born children in families are more rebellious. This suggests the possibility that in a population in which many families have many children, the level of rebelliousness in the society may be higher Sulloway, ; Skinner, ; Paulhus et al.

Unemployed young males with poor local prospects will feel angry and frustrated. They can seek a future in military endeavors, emigrate to take menial work, or become involved in criminal activity in a foreign and often culturally inhospitable environment. Sexual frustration may also be part of the picture. Marriage is often a high-cost matter in these countries because it requires substantial outlays for parents and elaborate ceremonies.

Young women have restricted choices in the local marriage market because of the male exodus and little hope of employment themselves unless they also emigrate especially if local customs deter them from entering the labor market.

Looking at these demographic and economic realities, it is clear that the majority of Muslims in the world experience a high level of absolute poverty. These poor compare themselves with the rich in their own societies and with an unrealistic view of Western culture gleaned from films and television, and thus they also experience a high level of relative deprivation.

This combination is a sure recipe for social unrest in general. Insofar as these conditions are blamed on the United States and the West in general—as they typically are—they also provide a favorable atmosphere for supporting violence against these enemies, as well as a potential recruiting ground for recruits to this cause.

To note this is not to argue that poverty causes terrorism, but that it is one ingredient in a volatile mix of causes. It is a reasonable historical generalization that those who are dominated—or who believe themselves to be dominated—by stronger outside powers come to resent and oppose their oppressors. Especially under conditions of imperialist and colonial domination, in which direct force is used against the population, this discontent can often be held in check, at least temporarily.

When societies experience economic and cultural domination without direct military occupation and political control, the opportunities to express discontent publicly are usually more readily available. This rejection of outside domination is not surprising and can be readily appreciated.

It is not as frequently appreciated. The other half is conveyed by the idea of ambivalence. To bring the point closer to home, anticolonial ideologies are mainly negative toward the colonial powers. But they also contain the seeds of positive attraction. A remote but telling instance of this is found in the cargo cults, a widespread religious phenomenon mainly in colonial Melanesia. These movements, which were millenarian, envisioned the end of the world accompanied by the arrival of Western ships or airplanes loaded with tinned foods, transistor radios, and other Western items.

At the millenarian moment, too, white Westerners would be destroyed, and the true believers would survive in a world of Western plenty Worsley, Further evidence of this type of ambivalence is provided by the fact that colonial societies, once independent, frequently establish institutions and retain political and other values resembling those of their former conquerors.

A similar ambivalence toward the United States is now found throughout the world, including perhaps especially Muslim societies. On one hand there is America the demon, the rich, godless, morally and sexually corrupt, imperialist country that has come to its wealth by exploitation, a power that dominates the world and forms alliances with the ruling elites in their own societies, a nation that is hypocritical in its assertions of equality when it is plagued with racism and poverty, and the power that is primarily responsible for the existence and support of Israel.

Side by side with this, however, is a utopian America, as the immigrant communities of Detroit, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles typify. America is a place to come to, a place of wealth and consumption where the payoff for hard work is leisure and opportunity, and where freedom is buttressed by myriad choices in both the market and in the polity.

This positive side of the ambivalence, moreover, stands in stark contrast to what almost all Muslims can realistically aspire to in their own societies.

Typically, it is psychologically difficult to hold both sides of an ambivalent attitude at the same time, and it usually is resolved by rigidly accentuating one side to the exclusion of the other.

In anti-American Muslim ideologies this appears to be the case, with vitriolic hostility as the conspicuous and exclusive element and the admiration and envy suppressed. Insights that. The complex of economic, political, and cultural penetration does not occur in a vacuum. It is always interpreted and reacted to in the framework of the cultural milieu it affects—accepted, altered, synthesized, or rejected, all in complex ways. An inevitable accompaniment of the process is the widespread perception that the domestic culture is under threat of extinction.

The reactions to this perception are, as indicated, multiple, but, in light of the religious character of much of recent terrorism, we take special note of what have been called revivalist or fundamentalist reactions. This variant of terrorism in particular has developed in the context of a wider Islamic revival.

Revivalist or fundamentalist movements are efforts to restore an often-imagined indigenous culture, especially its religion, to a pure and unadulterated form. Their elements have been found in American Indian movements such as the ghost dance Mooney, and peyote religion Slotkin, , revivalist cults, nationalist movements in colonial societies, revivalist and fundamentalist Christian movements, and in some extreme Western political movements such as fascism.

The typical ingredients of such movements are:. A profound sense of threat, angst, and apprehension about the destruction of their society, culture, and way of life.

A specification of certain agents who are assigned total responsibility for this deterioration. An unqualified, and absolute, sense of rage that is felt to be morally legitimate. A utopian view of their own culture and society—perhaps referring to an imagined, glorious past—standing in. The historical picture in many Muslim societies is not different from this general pattern.

The analogy is not between cults and terrorism as such, but between nativistic movements and Islamic revivalism, which provides a fertile ground for religiously based terrorism. It is also a religion with a proselytizing tradition and a centuries-long history of both conquest of and humiliation by Western Christian and Eastern Orthodox powers—a history actively remembered in detail in Muslim societies to this day.

It is, finally, a religion with a keen sense of infidels, both inside and outside Islam. All these features have conditioned the reactions to the West in Muslim societies, including the Islamic revival. Revivalist-like movements of a totalistic sort—i. Among these are the Safavid movement that eventually became the basis of the Shiite state in Iran. There were also a number of nineteenth-century antecedents, and the early twentieth century witnessed the rise and consolidation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its subsequent underground offshoots Voll, The widespread Islamic revival in contemporary times partakes of elements of these earlier movements but has added new and different ingredients Maddy-Weitzman, Some of these ingredients include: a It expresses the feelings of humiliation at the loss of the supremacy of Islam, the imposition of European commercial and colonial power, and the Euro-American domination in world affairs.

Its enemies are foreign infidels, non-Muslims in their midst, representatives of more moderate forms of Islam, and secular dictatorial regimes in their own societies. On the more constructive side, the goal of the revivalist movements is the creation of an ideal Islamic society, in which morals are pure and the community just, and all live in a state that protects a Muslim way of life, defends it against enemies, and aggrandizes the domain of Islam.

Explanations are varied and disagreements occur. For example, psycho-pathological explanations for terrorism tend to divest terrorism of socio-economic and political motivations. While researchers agree that one of the characteristics of a terrorist is normality, psycho-pathological factors amongst group leadership can play a significant role. Other theories over the causes of terrorism include:. Terrorism can occur in a variety of manners and instances.

Terrorists may be deprived, uneducated, affluent and from both sexes. It can occur in developed and undeveloped countries, in a variety of regimes. It encompasses ideology and religion. Though what gives rise to terrorism may be different from what perpetuates terrorism over time.

Societies that are more exposed tend to be:.