theories focus on the environment in which violence occurs. Much of this literature focuses on economic deprivation, implying that violent individuals are motivated by beliefs that they suffer from environmental strains, such as economic hardships.
Early research in this field suggests that people who take up arms against their states are motivated by feelings of frustration related to perceived deprivation and that “rebellions come to be when people cannot bear the misery of their lot” (Victoroff 2005: 19). Building on John Dollard et al.’s frustration-aggression hypothesis (1939) and Alexis de Tocqueville’s work on people’s dissatisfaction with their living situation ([1835] 2000), Ted Robert Gurr argues that “the proposed relation between perceived deprivation and the frustration concept in frustration-anger-aggression theory … provides a rationale for a more general definition of magnitude of violence and a more precise specification of what it comprises” (2011: 9).
Related recent analyses have presented an ambiguous picture. “Economic conditions and education are largely unrelated to participation in, and support for, terrorism,” according to a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in Hezbollah activities in Lebanon (Krueger and Maleckova 2002, 2003). The authors conclude that “having a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary school or higher education is positively associated with participation in Hezbollah” and “that Israeli Jewish settlers who attacked Palestinians in the West Bank in the early 1980s were overwhelmingly from high-paying occupations” (2002: abstract). In their 2011 statistical analysis of surveys from Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines, Berman et al. reach a similar conclusion: “The data rule out a positive correlation between unemployment and violence for all three countries: if there is an opportunity-cost effect, it is not dominant in any of them” (2011: 498; cf. Mousseau 2011; Blair et al. 2013). On the other hand, Meierrieks and Gries (2012) have provided new support for environmental-psychological explanations (2012). Based on an analysis of panel data for 160 countries from 1970 to 2007, they show that there is a “causal relationship between terrorism and growth” that is “heterogeneous over time and across space.” They conclude: “Growth unidirectionally Granger-causes terrorism for the Cold War era, while terrorism unilaterally Granger-causes growth for the post-Cold War era” (102, my italics). Similarly, James Piazza’s analysis of data from the Minority at Risk Project concludes that economic deprivation matters: “The empirical results show that countries that permit their minority communities to be afflicted by economic discrimination make themselves more vulnerable to domestic terrorism in a substantive way” (2011: 350).
Although not refuting the frustration-aggression hypothesis, these results suggest that its significance is limited, and that the relationship between environmental strains and violence remains unclear. In the words of Piazza, environmental-psychological explanations remain “inconclusive” (2011: 339). A major limitation is that environmental-psychological theories are rather static, implying that if environmental conditions change, the frequency with which political violence occurs will change as well. Such a linear causal relation can be refuted with reference to observations that the majority of people living in poverty do not take up arms (Victoroff 2005), that individuals as well as groups have embraced or renounced violence when environmental conditions stayed the same (Ashour 2007; Wickham 2002), or that individuals of the same group came from different environments (Ansari 1984; Ibrahim 1980).
This book shows that, as opposed to what is expected from environmental-psychological theories, violent individuals are not motivated by beliefs about environmental conditions, such as economic deprivation. Investigating the beliefs of violent individuals from two opposite environments—an authoritarian state suffering from economic hardship (Egypt) and a wealthy democracy (Germany)—the analysis shows that individuals instead decide to take up arms in response to the belief that the state is aggressive. By contrast, it shows that, surprisingly, individuals who engage in nonviolent activism in the same environments may be motivated by beliefs about economic deprivation.
Group Theories
Much of the recent research has examined the role of violent groups. This research emphasizes that individuals usually engage in violence against the state as part of groups, rather than as lone-wolf actors. This implies that violent individuals are motivated by beliefs about their groups.
Although much of this literature focuses on groups rather than individuals, some analysts in this field have also explored how groups may motivate individuals to turn to violence. For example, they have pointed to sociopsychological mechanisms according to which individuals first get in contact and are then absorbed by violent groups. Based on Marc Sageman’s famous analysis of the biographies of 172 individuals, for instance, it has been suggested that “terrorism is an emergent quality of the social networks formed by alienated young men who become transformed into fanatics yearning for martyrdom and eager to kill” (2004: vii). Albert Bandura has specified the psychological aspect of this theory by pointing to “mechanisms of moral disengagement” in which violent individuals abandon the “moral standards” adopted during their earlier “course of socialization” and begin to “refute” moral arguments, referring to “a higher level of morality, derived from communal concerns” (Bandura 1998: 161, 165).
More recently, Omar McDoom’s statistical analysis of 3,426 residents of a Rwanda community has provided support for the social aspect of this theory by showing that violent individuals “are likely to live either in the same neighbourhood or in the same household as other participants” (2013: 1). “Specifically, as the number of violent to nonviolent individuals in an individual’s neighbourhood or household increases, the likelihood of this individual’s participation also increases.” Three studies by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges on Palestinians and Jews have further specified psychological aspects according to which violent individuals “are motivated by moral commitments to collective sacred values” (2009: 115).
The finding that violent groups matter is widely accepted. In spite of the insight gained from the mentioned works, focusing on groups cannot explain the behavior of the individuals participating in those groups. Specifically, group theories leave open the questions of why certain individuals join violent groups as opposed to others who have access to the same groups; why certain but not other members of violent groups carry out particular attacks; or why certain members sometimes break away from their violent groups. Often, group theories also fail to consider that nonviolent groups may be interacting with the same individuals, operating in the same environment, and against the same targets.
As opposed to what is expected from group theories, this book shows that violent individuals are not motivated by beliefs about violent groups. Specifically, I find that the beliefs violent individuals hold about their groups do not matter to their decisions to take up arms. Moreover, I find that, surprisingly, nonviolent individuals may hold the same beliefs about violent groups. In particular, the nonviolent individuals I interviewed also hold beliefs that they interacted with members of violent groups. This indicates that they also had group access, but as opposed to what is expected from group theories, this did not motivate them to take up arms.
Psychopathological Theories
Although psychopathological theories have been widely discarded, they deserve attention because they continue to be quoted by numerous analysts of political violence and by the news. Specifically, psychopathological theories have been dedicated to searching for a “terrorist personality.” They have also argued that violent individuals suffer from mental illness. This implies that violent individuals are motivated by beliefs that do not correspond to reality (mental illnesses) or beliefs related to their personality (“terrorist personality”).
Theodor Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality, written in the aftermath of World War II, presents one of the first contributions to this field. Focusing on “the potentially fascistic individual,” the book explores the hypothesis “that the political, economic, and social convictions of an individual often form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a ‘mentality’ or ‘spirit,’ and that this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality” (1950: 1). Lloyd Etheredge’s “Hardball Politics: A Model” (1979) builds on Adorno’s theory and has inspired numerous additional