Ideologies of Terrorism: Understanding and Countering the Social,
Psychological and Political Underpinnings of Terrorism

Terrorism is fast becoming the number one security threat faced by NATO member and partner countries. Defence against terrorism is multidimensional involving technological approaches to safeguarding populations and installations, military and intelligence activities to penetrate and destroy terrorist organization networks and most importantly academic, political and diplomatic approaches to understand and begin to get at the multifaceted root causes of terrorism. This meeting focused on the latter, expressly bringing together a group of world-renowned scholars to examine the issue of how ideology is used to motivate and recruit individuals into terrorist activities and how policy makers can begin to address religious and non-religious ideologies that promote terrorism. Ideologies espoused by terror organizations are not fabricated in a social vacuum. On the contrary they are made up of a social dialogue of a type that resonates throughout and may spring up within societies in which terror organizations operate - often as a result of societal conditions that are perceived as oppressive or unjust within these societies as well as outside of them. Increasingly the Internet is being used as a means of promulgating terrorism promoting ideologies. Through video footage and photos from conflict zones and also of human rights violations, terror organizations make a call to political violence from populations worldwide who by virtue of sympathy, ethnicity or religion make a link identifying themselves with those suffering within the conflict zones. In these cases an appeal is made for financial, logistical and militant support for the terrorist cause, a call that is increasingly being heeded within Europe especially by alienated migrant first through third generation citizens as well as others whose personal issues resonate with those they find being broadcast over the Internet. This creates a social context in which indigenous terrorism within Europe and the NATO countries increasingly becomes a threat. The topic of how terrorism ideologies are formulated, utilized, motivate for terrorism and how they can be contained is extremely relevant to current public policy and requires an understanding of the phenomena as well as a combined international policy strategy to approach it in a coordinated manner. Currently there is an extremely small empirical research database on which policy-makers may base their understanding of the political, social and psychological roots of terrorism; it’s genesis and the use of differing ideologies to motivate for acts of violence and even suicide in behalf of the terrorist cause. This advanced research workshop by bringing together a group of individuals collecting data in the field and theorizing on the root causes of terrorism contributed to and expanded our understanding of how terrorist ideologies are being used to motivate and recruit in behalf of terrorism and how to combat them.

Dr. Speckhard co-directed the Ideologies of Terrorism: Understanding and Countering the Social, Psychological and Political Underpinnings of Terrorism Advanced Research Workshop and serves on the NATO-Russia Counterterrorism Task Force and the NATO Human Factors and Medicine Panel Exploratory Team on “Psychosocial, Organisational and Cultural Aspects of Terrorism and has also served as a speaker or chair in the following NATO events: