The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism, by Mark S. Hamm and Ramon Spaaij (foreword, by Simon Cottee)

Foreword

Simon Cottee The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism— a massive study of lone-actor terrorism in the United States—is the product of years of patient and dogged empirical investigation. It is also the culmination of a lot of hard thinking about the interior world and entanglements of that most quintessentially American iteration of contemporary terrorism: the atomized and anomic loner who kills for political purposes. Just what is it about these individuals that so captivates the authors of this book? Hamm and Spaaij, for their part, offer few clues; they are far too interested in their subject matter to indulge in any emoting about their own subjectivity. Nonetheless, it is not hard to intuit the rudiments of an answer to this question: lone actor terrorists present a conundrum, an endlessly fascinating perplexity. They were not born terrorists, and there was nothing inevitable about their trajectory toward terrorism. So how did they become transformed, or transform themselves, into terrorists? This remains an underexplored and dimly understood question, even in the field of terrorism studies, where the focus is almost exclusively on collective political violence. The enduring merit of The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism is that it provides an empirically robust and theoretically nuanced framework for addressing how ordinary individuals can become the agents of extraordinary violence and destruction.

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A common complaint leveled at scholarly work on terrorism is that it lacks a fi rm grounding in empirical research on actual terrorists and terrorist groups. “The study of terrorism,” Martha Crenshaw wrote in 2000, “still lacks the foundation of extensive primary data based on interviews and life histories of individuals engaged in terrorism.” There is some justice to the complaint. But it is not one that can reasonably be targeted at The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism. Quite the contrary: drawing on an extensive database of all known cases of lone wolf terrorism in the U.S. between 1940 and mid-2016 (123 cases in total), The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism provides a model for empirically driven research on terrorism, using rich case-studies, first-hand interviews with lone wolf terrorists (“Today,” the authors dryly comment, “it may be easier for a convict to escape from an American prison than it is for a criminologist to enter one”) and other ethnographic documents, to illustrate and support broader theorization about the social and psychological processes involved in lone actor terrorism.

There is a minor cottage industry of research on definitional issues related to terrorism. Hamm and Spaaij, thankfully, do not engage in any tortuous semantic exercises; they defi ne lone wolf terrorism, commonsensically enough, as “political violence perpetrated by individuals who act alone; who do not belong to an orga nized terrorist group or network; who act without the direct influence of a leader or hierarchy; and whose tactics and methods are directed by the individual without any direct outside command or direction.”

What will you learn about lone wolves from reading this book? You will learn, variously: • that since 9/11 high-velocity fi rearms have displaced bombs as the favored weaponry of lone wolves; • that over the same period the target of lone wolf attacks has switched from civilians to law enforcement and military personnel; • that a third of lone wolves, as if reading from a Quentin Tarantino movie script, reference and copy the example of earlier lone wolves; • that lone wolves are becoming younger (the average age of the pre-9/11 lone wolf at the time of their attack was 38, compared to 31 for their post-9/11 counter parts); • that, typically, lone wolves are white, unemployed, single men from an urban area and with a prior criminal rap-sheet;

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• that lone wolf terrorism is largely male: there have been no women lone wolf terrorists in the U.S. since 1993, and only five out of the pre-9/11 sample were women; • that lone wolf terrorism and cloudless mental health don’t tend to go together: approximately 40 percent of the lone wolves in Hamm and Spaaij’s database suffered from mental illness; • that lone wolves are motivated by a combination of personal and political grievances; • that lone wolves are “enabled” by others, in terms of both ideological inspiration and direct unwitting assistance; • that an active engagement with, and immersion in, a “warrior subculture” is a crucial element in the moral career of becoming a lone wolf terrorist; • that lone wolves nearly always broadcast their intent to commit terrorism; and • that acts of lone wolf terrorism are often catalyzed by a “triggering event.”

The last five data points form the basis of what Hamm and Spaaij call “the radicalization model of lone wolf terrorism,” according to which lone wolf terrorism is the culmination of a cumulative “process of human change and transformation.” Although this suggests a certain neatness to the radicalization process, Hamm and Spaaij make it clear that their model isn’t necessarily linear, insisting that the distinct and fateful phases they identify in the life-histories of lone actor terrorists— grievances, affinity with an extremist group and enablers, behavioral cuing of intent to do harm, and triggering events—vary in the order in which they materialize.

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach,” writes the narrator of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, “that it makes no sense.” American Pastoral is a murder mystery in which the focal point of contention is not the who, but the why. The book’s central protagonist, Seymour Levov, is a successful businessman whose sixteen-year-old daughter Meredith (“Merry”) blows up a post office to protest the Vietnam War, killing a bystander. All Seymour can think about is why Merry did it. She was an adored only child who grew up in a privileged and decent family in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock, New Jersey. Seymour is desperate to locate “the wound” that caused Merry’s violence. But there was no wound, and as the novel progresses, what Seymour learns is that his daughter is “unknowable,” and

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that “there are no reasons,” that “reasons are in books.” I have a great deal of sympathy for this position. Yet Hamm and Spaaij give it a good run for its money, showing that however tangled and complex the lives of lone actor terrorists are, there are commonalties of experience across scores of cases. Perhaps terrorists are, at some level, knowable after all.

In a recent article on the “stagnation in terrorism research,” Marc Sageman lamented that after a decade of sustained research on terrorism, “we are no closer to answering the simple question of ‘What leads a person to turn to political violence?’ ” The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism presents a strong case for revising this judgment.

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