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Abstract
The London bombings in 2005 led to the perception that the terrorist threat had changed from external to internal. This became conceptualized shortly after as “homegrown terrorism.” This article deals with the meaning and scope of this phenomenon. We begin by tracing an ambiguity in the term “homegrown,” which is both about belonging in the West and autonomy from terrorist groups abroad. A quantitative study of Islamist terrorism in the West since 1989 reveals an increase in both internal and autonomous terrorism since 2003 and that most plots are now internal—but not autonomous. Finally we suggest that an increase in autonomous terrorism is a transitory phenomenon.
Notes
a The first value in each cell is the observed value. N of the category is given in brackets, which is the total N of the period (given at the far right of the table) minus the missing values for the category. The missing value for each category can thus be found by subtracting the value in brackets from the total N of the period. The percentage value is the proportion of the observed value of the N of the category.
The West is defined here in geographical terms as North America, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe (i.e., the old NATO members excluding Turkey) plus Switzerland and Sweden.
It later became evident that there were links to organized terror groups. Intelligence and Security Committee, “Could 7/7 Have Been Prevented?,” edited by the Review of the Intelligence on the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005 (2009).
Dataset available on authors' web pages: www.diis.dk/sw45272.asp and www.harrow.ws.
Harrow finds that individuals reaching out to Islamist militants in Iraq during the Iraq war has not led to an increased threat from terrorism. Martin Harrow, “The Effect of the Iraq War on Islamist Terrorism in the West,” Cooperation and Conflict 45, no. 3 (2010): 1–13.
Petter Nesser, “How Did Europe's Global Jihadis Obtain Training for Their Militant Causes?,” Terrorism and Political Violence 20, no. 2 (2008): 234–256.
Thomas Precht, “Home Grown Terrorism and Islamist Radicalisation in Europe - from Conversion to Terrorism,” in Research report funded by the Danish Ministry of Justice (Copenhagen: Danish Ministry of Justice, 2007).
Ibid., 15.
Michael Genkin and Alexander Gutfraind, “How Do Terrorist Cells Self-Assemble? Insights from an Agent-Based Model,” Social Science Research Network, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1031521.
Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Bruce Hoffman, “The Myth of Grass-Roots Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 3 (2008): 133–138.
Aiden Kirby, “The London Bombers as ‘Self-Starters’: A Case Study in Indigenous Radicalization and the Emergence of Autonomous Cliques,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 30, no. 5 (2007): 415.
Lars Erslev Andersen, “Over Alle Bjerge,” Euroman, no. 2 (2009).
Genkin and Gutfraind (see note 8 above).
Jung Kim, Cheol-Won Lee, and Eul Gyu Im, “Changes of Cyber-Terrorism: Autonomous Terrors and Counter-Measures,” in Computational Science and Its Applications – Iccsa 2007, edited by O. Gervasi and M. Gavrilova (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2007).
Nesser (see note 5 above).
Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
Evan F. Kohlmann, “‘Homegrown’ Terrorists: Theory and Cases in the War on Terror's Newest Front,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July (2008): 98.
Precht (see note 6 above), 31.
By Islamist militants we understand individuals who make use of violence and who legitimize their acts in Islamic terms. Terrorism is a subcategory of militancy. We use militancy for violent, contentious activities outside the West in order to avoid having to distinguish between terrorism and guerilla warfare. For a further discussion of this distinction see Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, eds., The History of Terrorism - from Antiquity to Al-Qaida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 45.
Maja Povrzanović Frykman, “Challenges of Belonging in Diaspora and Exile: An Introduction,” in Beyond Integration: Challenges of Belonging in Diaspora and Exile, ed. Maja Povrzanović Frykman (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2001); Nauja Kleist, “Ambivalent Encounters. Negotiating Boundaries of Danishness, Somaliness, and Belonging,” in From Mogadishu to Dixon, ed. Abdi M. Kusow and Stephanie R. Björk (Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2007).
Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rootings of People and Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992).
Foiled and failed plots include planning and attempts of terrorism that did not result in a terrorism act. We thus exclude cases tried under terrorism laws such as inciting to hatred, possession of a terrorist manual, etc. The foiled and failed plots included in this study have generally been successfully prosecuted in court. However, a few cases in which nobody was convicted but where the physical evidence suggests a failed plot, i.e., an unexploded bomb, have also been included.
Paul Wilkinson, “International Terrorism: New Risks to World Order,” in Dilemmas of World Politics: International Issues in a Changing World, ed. J. Baylis and N. Rengger (London: Clarendon Press, 1992), 279.
A number of debates about the definition of terrorism concern the target: military, government, civilian. This distinction is mostly relevant for distinguishing between terrorism and guerilla warfare in areas with ongoing or latent civil war. No distinctions between different targets are made in this study. Another definitional debate pertains to the motives, typically in order to be able to distinguish between criminal activities and terrorism. In this study, this distinction is dealt with in the assessment of Islamism: If a murder is committed to further an Islamist cause, it is regarded as Islamist terrorism. For a more in-depth discussion, see Magnus Ranstorp, “Introduction: Mapping Terrorism Research - Challenges and Priorities,” in Mapping Terrorism Research - State of the Art, Gaps and Future Direction, ed. Magnus Ranstorp (Stokholm: Swedish National Defence College, 2006), Chaliand and Blin (see note 19 above), Wilkinson (see note 23 above), 228–257.
Global Terrorism Database, “Global Terrorism Database 1 & 2,” National Consortium for the Study of and Responses to Terrorism, http://www.start.umd.edu/data/gtd/.
Petter Nesser, “Jihad in Europe - a Survey of the Motivations for Sunni Islamist Terrorism in Post-Millennium Europe,” in FFI/Rapport (Kjeller: Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, 2004).
Genkin and Gutfraind (see note 8 above).
Precht (see note 6 above).
Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 157.
80 attacks and plots have been identified. We were able to find information on 260 individuals in 68 plots, resulting in an average of 3.8 identified conspirators per plot. Of 260 individuals, 32 were in more than one plot, leaving 228 unique individuals. For the statistics on individual terrorists, each terrorist appears only once. For data on age, etc., they appear with their first known plot or attack. All of the data can be found on the authors' web pages: www.diis.dk/sw45272.asp and www.harrow.ws.
Genkin and Gutfraind (see note 8 above).
The variable “More than five years in West” has the mean value of 16.05 and standard deviation of 11.22 and the variable “Formative years in West (0-16)” has the mean value of 4.30 and the standard deviation of 3.30 for the entire period. The N is too small to be meaningful to include these values for each period.
Note that the variables are more vulnerable to random variation, as N is lower, which is because more information is required: year of birth and year of arrival in the West.
A previous study has identified a two-year lag of transnational dynamics on terrorism in the West. Martin Harrow, “Transnational Dynamics and Islamist Terrorism in the West,” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 3, no. 1 (2010): 1–13.