Violent extremist group ecologies under stress

Additional Guidance on Aftercare and Reintegration Programmes for Violent Extremist Offenders

Unemployment and Right-Wing Extremist Crime

Right-wing extremism is a serious problem in many societies. A prominent hypothesis states that unemployment plays a crucial role for the occurrence of right-wing extremist crime. In this paper we empirically test this hypothesis. We use a previously not used data set which includes all officially recorded right-wing criminal acts in Germany. These data are recorded by the German Federal Crimin...

Patterns of Thinking in Militant Extremism.

Recurrent features of the thinking pattern (or mind-set) of violent militant extremists are delineated, discussed, and related to previous research and theory. We examined extremist groups from a diverse range of continents, cultures, and political and religious orientations. We compared statements by (and, to some degree, statements about) these groups and formulated 16 themes common to the mi...

Dying the right-way? Interest in and perceived persuasiveness of parochial extremist propaganda increases after mortality salience

Research on parochial altruism demonstrated that hostility toward out-groups (parochialism) represents the dark side of the willingness to benefit one's in-group even at own costs (altruism). Parochial aggression thereby emerged mainly under conditions of threat. Extremist propaganda videos, for instance by right-wing extremists, try to capitalize on parochial altruistic mechanism by telling re...

Psychological vulnerabilities and propensities for involvement in violent extremism.

Research on the psychology of terrorism has argued against the idea that most terrorist behavior is caused by mental illness or by a terrorist personality. This article suggests an alternative line of inquiry - an individual psychology of terrorism that explores how otherwise normal mental states and processes, built on characteristic attitudes, dispositions, inclinations, and intentions, might...