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Background to Research Project: Violent Extremism

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Neurocognitive Risk Assessment for the Early Detection of Violent Extremists

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Criminology ((BRIEFSPOLICI))

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Abstract

In this second main section, the extant literature on violent extremism is critically examined in relation to its cousin ‘terrorism’ and its offspring ‘radicalisation’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.strategicdialogue.org/programmes/counter-extremism/. Accessed 2/11/13.

  2. 2.

    The author acknowledges that defining ‘violent extremism’ is just as slippery and problematic to define as ‘terrorism’. Both are highly contested notions. The conceptual and definitional issues surrounding these terms have been the subject of a number of texts and are not the primary focus of this chapter and hence are not addressed here.

  3. 3.

    The Department of Homeland Security has developed a number of case studies on violent extremism groups like violent anarchists, racist skinheads and sovereign citizen extremists (DHS, 2012).

  4. 4.

    It is not the purpose of this chapter to go into an extensive review of the multiple reasons for the highly contested nature of terrorism. There is an abundance of literature on this issue. Schmid in his 2004a paper provides a useful overview and discussion in this regard.

  5. 5.

    The author acknowledges the contested notion of ‘radicalisation’ as an ill-defined problem in the literature which is often confounded with terrorism. Space does not permit a full examination of this term in this chapter. Readers are referred to the works of Horgan (2008a, 2009a, 2009b) in this regard.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Law School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

    Geoff Dean

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Dean, G. (2014). Background to Research Project: Violent Extremism. In: Neurocognitive Risk Assessment for the Early Detection of Violent Extremists. SpringerBriefs in Criminology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06719-3_2

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