| ID | 178946 |
| Title Proper | On Re-engagement and Risk Factors |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Altier, Mary Beth ; Horgan, John G ; Boyle, Emma Leonard |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | We thank Marc Sageman for his interest in our article and are grateful to Terrorism and Political Violence for the opportunity to respond. Our study was part of a three-year grant-funded project entitled “Pathways, Processes, Factors, and Roles for Terrorist, Disengagement, Re-engagement, and Recidivism.” The aim was to better understand individual-level disengagement from terrorism, as well as re-engagement and recidivism. We conducted two extensive reviews of literature from relevant disciplines—one on terrorist disengagement and another on terrorist re-engagement and recidivism.1 We then collected and analyzed data from a sample of autobiographies penned by individuals formerly involved in terrorist groups and conducted in-depth, in-person interviews with another sample of individuals who had left terrorist groups. The questionnaire and codebook that we developed to capture information from our autobiographical sample compiled data on subjects’ lives prior to their involvement in terrorism, important aspects of their involvement in terrorism including the nature of the groups they belonged to, and the conditions surrounding their disengagement and re-engagement and/or recidivism. An entire section of our questionnaire and codebook are dedicated to investigating not only whether individuals re-engaged, but the circumstances of that re-engagement and what we identified as hypothesized risk factors. We reiterate this because Sageman implies throughout his critique that we were using data that we originally compiled to study something else (disengagement) to then “derive a recidivism rate.” We did not. Although our findings on disengagement were analyzed and published first,2 the purpose of the broader project was always to consider re-engagement and recidivism. This informed our review of relevant literature, generation of hypotheses, and the development of data collection protocols. |
| `In' analytical Note | Terrorism and Political Violence Vol. 33, No.1-4; Jan-Jun 2021: p.868-874 |
| Journal Source | Terrorism and Political Violence Vol: 33 No 1-4 |