| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Dr. Sageman makes a good point that despite the influx of government funding in the last decade, terrorism scholars have not been able to answer what he calls a "simple question"-what leads a person to turn to political violence? But Dr. Sageman's conclusion that scholars' inability to answer this question is evidence of stagnation in the field is incorrect. First, most scholars who study terrorism are addressing risk factors for terrorism at the level of societies, not individuals, so it is hardly surprising that there is no "consensus answer" to Dr. Sageman's question. Second, the question Dr. Sageman poses about individual level decision-making is not at all simple to assess. It is difficult to make gross generalizations about what leads individuals to do what they do in any area of life; difficulty in answering this question is not unique to terrorism experts. Consider analogous questions about individual decision-making with regard to other life choices. Despite significantly more than a decade of study, neither scientists nor humanists have been able to explain, ex ante, what leads a person to fall in love, to murder another, or to choose a particular career path (as a terrorist, or otherwise). A detailed study of an individual's life history might enable scholars to propose ex post hypotheses as to why that individual chose a career as a terrorism expert rather than as a terrorist, but even then, experts from varying disciplines (including psychiatry) would focus on different parts of the problem, seen through different lenses. It is not clear why Dr. Sageman holds terrorism scholarship to a standard that no other group of scholars aiming to understand and predict human behavior has yet been able to achieve.
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