This commentary on Potts et al provides a critical view on their thesis that increasing the level of education among women is likely to reduce terrorism. Presence of a strong family planning program enables women to control family size resulting in women’s public participation more likely and facilitating the emergence of small birth cohorts who are less likely to become unemployed. In spite of...

In her paper "The Global Phenomenon of 'Humanizing' Terrorism in Literature and Cinema" Elaine Martin presents -following a discussion of two early examples, Schiller's The Robbers and Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810) -an analysis of several contemporary works that model different ways of representing terrorism: Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) and its 1976 f...

A systematic view of terrorism research to reveal the intellectual structure of the field and empirically discern the distinct set of core researchers, institutional affiliations, publications, and conceptual areas can help us gain a deeper understanding of approaches to terrorism. This paper responds to this need by using an integrated knowledge-mapping framework that we developed to identify ...

Over the past decade, terrorism risk has become a prominent consideration in protecting the well-being of individuals and organizations. More recently, there has been interest in not only quantifying terrorism risk, but also placing it in the context of an all-hazards environment in which consideration is given to accidents and natural hazards, as well as intentional acts. This article discusse...

With the threat posed by terrorism involving radioactive materials now high on the nation's agenda, local, state, and federal agencies are moving to enhance preparedness and response capabilities. Crucial to these efforts is the development of effective risk communication strategies. This article reports findings from an ongoing study of risk communication issues in nuclear/radiological terrori...

As national and international large-scale incidents of terrorism increasingly threaten populations around the world, understanding the mental health effects of terrorism becomes a pressing need. Terrorism is fueled by the potential psychological effects it is intended to exert on populations. If the population is terrorized, intimidated, demoralized, and immobilized, then terrorism has succeede...

The volume of research on terrorism has increased since the events of September 11, 2001. However, efforts to develop a contextualized model incorporating cognitive, social-contextual, and affective factors as predictors of individual responses to this threat have been limited. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate a series of hypotheses drawn from such a model that was generated fro...

Arriving at a consensual definition of the phenomenon of terrorism has been a particularly difficult undertaking. Some definitions are either too specific or too vague, concentrating on some essential “terrorist” aspect of the actions, strategies, or types of non-state organizations that engage in terrorism. In this paper I draw on global approaches from international relations and world system...

Dr. Bruce Hoffman is Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence and Chairman of the Department of International Relations, St. Andrews University, Scotland. The face of terrorism is changing. New adversaries, new motivations, and new rationales have surfaced in recent years to challenge the conventional wisdom on both terrorists and terrorism. More critically, perh...