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Terrorist Typologies: Compare And Contrast Terrorists

Decent Essays

(1) Compare and contrast terrorist typologies.

There are several different reasons why terrorists attack; so broad, that many people debate about the official definition of terrorism. However, terrorists are defined in typologies to help sort some of this definition conflict. Typologies focus on the social meanings behind terrorist tactics and violence.

Within the several typologies, there are five main terrorist and violence typologies. These typologies are criminal, political, pathological, labor, and war. Terrorism can fall under any of these; usually terrorists fall under more than just one category. It is better to look at the typologies as a color spectrum.

The significant difference between all the five typologies are the motivations …show more content…

Guilt transfer is when an individual/group places the blame on another. Terrorism wise, terrorists use guilt transfer to give them moral justification into their attacks. According to White, “As the amount of force increases, the need to justify it becomes greater…When a person threatens to kill or does kill another person, he or she must feel it was right to do so...” (White, 2012, p. 45). In other words, terrorists, in order to keep their followers, need to provide reasoning behind what they are doing.
There are many factors on what causes terrorism. One of many is because terrorists “…emotionally attach themselves to an ideology, they cannot tolerate moral ambiguity, and they have the capacity to suppress instinctive and learned moral limitations…” (White, 2012, p. 47). In the sense of the Middle Eastern conflict (i.e. ISIL), the West is the complete opposite of their ideologies.
ISIL’s goal is to overthrow the current governments and create their own universal caliphate. To top it off, ISIL (for example) distorts the Quran and the teachings to support their moral justification on the violence they create in their path. The United States and its allies attacked ISIL at their strong

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