The following Q&A on terrorism is part of Learning Life’s Big Questions Series. The series offers experts’ short answers to big questions, with more information about the experts and their research for those curious to learn more. We inaugurated the series on the 12th anniversary of 9/11 (2013) with three big questions about terrorism and provocative answers from three noted terrorism researchers. This page offers their answers to our first question: what are the underlying causes of terrorism?
Read expert answers to Question 2 (how big a threat is terrorism?) and Question 3(how does news media reporting shape terrorism and public perception of terrorism?).
Dr. Ziad Munson:
This is the most important, and most difficult, question facing those who study terrorism. The short answer is: we don’t yet have all the answers. And there is no single “master cause” of terrorism; different terrorist campaigns arise from a different set of interrelated root causes. We do, however, know that a number of well-publicized factors are NOT in fact at the root cause of terrorism. For example, we know that poverty doesn’t cause terrorism. We know that lack of education doesn’t cause terrorism. We know that particular religious traditions don’t cause terrorism. And we know that terrorism is not caused by those who are crazy (at least not in any clinical sense).
We do also know that terrorist attacks are almost all the responsibility of otherwise ordinary kinds of organizations. “Lone gunman” terrorism is exceedingly rare – 99.8% of terrorism is planned and carried out by formal organizations, not individuals acting alone. Organizations turn to terrorism as part of a strategy to pursue political objectives. And yes, their objectives are almost always political, even when cloaked in religious ideology and language as is so often the case today.
Dr. Gary LaFree:
The START Center analyzed the top twenty most active terrorist organizations since the 1970s – including such groups as the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna or Basque Homeland & Freedom) in Spain, the IRA (Irish Republican Army) in Ireland, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in Colombia, the Shining Path in Peru, the Taliban in Afghanistan – and found that the vast majority are fighting over land. Moreover, they are fighting locally or nationally, not internationally. The vast majority of terrorist attacks are domestic attacks by citizens, not foreigners. al-Qaeda is a notable and more complex exception because they are like an international social movement franchise, with local affiliates in different parts of the world having somewhat different motivations and goals.
Gary LaFree is Director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. START is currently engaged in approximately 40 research projects dealing mostly with the human causes and consequences of terrorism. Dr. LaFree is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), and a member of the National Academy of Science’s Crime, Law and Justice Committee. He has served as President of the ASC and of the ASC’s Division on International Criminology. Dr. LaFree has published more than 70 articles and three books. Much of Dr. LaFree’s current research is on trends in criminal and political violence.
Ziad Munson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University, where he founded and currently directs the Social Science Research Center. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1993 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996 and 2002. His research and teaching focuses on the intersection of popular mobilization, civic engagement, and religion. He is the author of The Making of Pro-Life Activists, a study of recruitment and mobilization in the American pro-life movement (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He has also authored articles and chapters on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, religion and politics in the U.S., and the role of civil society in wartime. He is currently working on a new project on the organizational infrastructure of international political violence. Click here for more on Dr. Munson’s teaching and research.
How does news media reporting shape terrorism and public perception?
The following Q&A on terrorism is part of Learning Life’s Big Questions Series. The series offers experts’ short answers to big questions, with more information about the experts and their research for those curious to learn more. We inaugurated the series on the 12th anniversary of 9/11 (2013) with three big questions about terrorism and provocative answers from three noted terrorism researchers. This page offers their answers to our third question: how does news media reporting shape terrorism and public perception of terrorism?
Read expert answers to Question 1 (what are the underlying causes of terrorism?) and Question 2 (how big a threat is terrorism?).
Dr. Gary LaFree:
Terrorism and the media go hand in hand. Indeed, modern terrorism would not exist without mass media. It would have been difficult to terrorize the whole world back in 1850 because terrorists then would have had a harder time widely publicizing their act, but now you can terrorize the world instantaneously through mass media. Further, most of what researchers know about terrorism comes from careful analysis of media reports. Some people have referred to terrorism as theater. One of the main goals of terrorist organizations is to get media attention, and they are very concerned about controlling their image in the media. It’s one of the dark sides of the communications revolution.
Dr. Dennis Mileti:
Let’s focus on the public’s perception of risk because that’s critical. First, there is no objective reality for human beings. What people think or perceive as real is reality for them. Second, what people think or perceive often has little to do with objective risk. This is fundamental to how human beings are wired. It applies to all risk, not just terrorism. Third, the media presents people with information, and that information shapes public perception of risk. Since most of what people know about terrorism is through the media, media is the major player in shaping public perception of terrorism.
The objective of a terrorist is to become an applied social psychologist, to influence the media so as to increase the public’s perception of terrorism risk and disrupt civil society as a result. Thus, when air travel fell off after 9/11, the terrorists were successful in shaping public perception of risk. The impact on the public’s perception of risk is relatively short-lived though. It takes approximately two years after a terrorist event before the population goes back to the risk perception levels they had prior to the event. The media, however, can keep that risk perception elevated, whether or not there is a real risk.
Gary LaFree is Director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. START is currently engaged in approximately 40 research projects dealing mostly with the human causes and consequences of terrorism. Dr. LaFree is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), and a member of the National Academy of Science’s Crime, Law and Justice Committee. He has served as President of the ASC and of the ASC’s Division on International Criminology. Dr. LaFree has published more than 70 articles and three books. Much of Dr. LaFree’s current research is on trends in criminal and political violence.
Dennis Mileti is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he served as Director of the Natural Hazards Center and as Chair of the Department of Sociology. He is author of over 100 publications, most on the societal aspects of hazards and disasters. His book, Disasters by Design, summarized the U.S. effort to assess knowledge and national policy for hazards and disasters. He played a major role in the research that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) performed for the U.S. Congress on evacuation of World Trade Center Towers 1 & 2 on 9/11. Click here for more on Dr. Mileti’s research.
How big a threat is terrorism?
The following Q&A on terrorism is part of Learning Life’s Big Questions Series. The series offers experts’ short answers to big questions, with more information about the experts and their research for those curious to learn more. We inaugurated the series on the 12th anniversary of 9/11 (2013) with three big questions about terrorism and provocative answers from three noted terrorism researchers. This page offers their answers to our second question: how big a threat is terrorism?
Read expert answers to Question 1(what are the underlying causes of terrorism?) and Question 3(how does news media reporting shape terrorism and public perception of terrorism?).
Dr. Ziad Munson:
Regular Americans trying to judge the threat of terrorism from the media coverage it receives or the amount of tax dollars spent on it, would certainly conclude that terrorism represents a grave threat to our society. The annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security, whose principal mission is to prevent terrorism, is over $43 billion (by way of comparison, the budget for the entire Department of Education is about $46 billion). The New York Times ran 184 different articles with “terrorism” in the headline in 2011 and 2012, despite the fact that only a single act of terrorism occurred in the U.S. in those years, a white supremacist attack on a Sikh temple.
The actual risk terrorism looks much different than can be accounted for by either federal spending or media attention. The best way to evaluate the threat of terrorism is to compare the risk of dying in a terrorist attack to the risk of dying due to other causes. Here the facts are clear: You are 8 times as likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack; 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed; and over 1,000 times more likely to die in a car accident. In fact, the chance of dying at the hands of international terrorists is about the same as drowning in a toilet or in an accident involving a deer. None of these statistics mean that terrorism isn’t a threat or that we should be complacent in combating it. But they do suggest that much of our fear of terrorism is misplaced. In fact, recent studies suggest that the fear of terrorism can be more deadly than acts of terrorism themselves: the fear of flying after the 9/11 attacks led to approximately 250 more driving deaths each year than would have occurred had people chosen to fly at the same rate they did before the attack. This is many times more than the number of Americans killed each year in terrorist attacks.
Dr. Gary LaFree:
One’s risk of being injured or killed in a terrorist act is indeed statistically very small, but it’s worth emphasizing that the threat of terrorism can be as important as the actual violence. Terrorism captures the public imagination and incites fear, as we experienced right here in the Washington D.C. metro area when John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo shot and killed nearly a dozen commuters in Maryland and Virginia over 23 days in October 2002. The 9/11 terrorists in turn killed an unusually large number of people, but their impact on policy and public perception of terrorism has been massive.
The great fear terrorism inspires seems to be due to its randomness, but also the seriousness of the potential threat. There is the possibility of even more destructive attacks than 9/11, like a chemical, radiological, biological or nuclear attack. Think, for example, of the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, which killed thirteen people, but could have killed many, many more given crowded subways and the deadliness of sarin gas. The combination of densely packed urban populations and technological advances increase potential damage terrorists can inflict. It used to be that you needed a whole complex to create dangerous weapons of mass destruction, but technological improvements have made it such that you can carry a dangerous chemical lab in a suitcase. Nowadays, you can get instructions for constructing a bomb free on the internet. Thus, we still need policy that protects against the really bad possibilities that are very unlikely, but that would be disastrous if they happened.
Gary LaFree is Director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. START is currently engaged in approximately 40 research projects dealing mostly with the human causes and consequences of terrorism. Dr. LaFree is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), and a member of the National Academy of Science’s Crime, Law and Justice Committee. He has served as President of the ASC and of the ASC’s Division on International Criminology. Dr. LaFree has published more than 70 articles and three books. Much of Dr. LaFree’s current research is on trends in criminal and political violence.
Ziad Munson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University, where he founded and currently directs the Social Science Research Center. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1993 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996 and 2002. His research and teaching focuses on the intersection of popular mobilization, civic engagement, and religion. He is the author of The Making of Pro-Life Activists, a study of recruitment and mobilization in the American pro-life movement (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He has also authored articles and chapters on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, religion and politics in the U.S., and the role of civil society in wartime. He is currently working on a new project on the organizational infrastructure of international political violence. Click here for more on Dr. Munson’s teaching and research.
Fall Internships Now Available
Students:
Looking for an interesting internship opportunity this fall semester?
Do you love learning?
Are you interested in helping to educate the public in innovative ways?
If so, you may be interested in the following internship with Learning Life…
Note: Inquiries in advance about interning over winter break or spring semester 2014 are welcome.
ABOUT LEARNING LIFE
Learning Life is a non-profit educational project based in Alexandria, VA, in the Washington D.C. metro area, and a program of United Charitable Programs, a registered 501(c)(3) public charity. Learning Life seeks to inform and empower more people by spreading knowledge on the surfaces of everyday life – like volunteer and employment opportunities on tabletop tents in school cafeterias, health and safety facts on posters in public bathrooms and laundromats, poetry and philosophy on cup sleeves in cafes and coasters in bars, science and history on napkins and cereal boxes, etc. – then connecting these surfaces to a world of learning here at Learning Life’s website.
At Learning Life, we work for a world where learning happens in everyday life, not just in school, a world with less inequality and more empowered people because knowledge is everywhere, fun and rewarding. We are looking for motivated volunteer and interns who want to help us build this better world.
ABOUT THE INTERNSHIP
Learning Life is now recruiting responsible, motivated graduate and undergraduate students to help with a variety of tasks including academic and market research, quiz development on a variety of topics, website, design and social media work, and assisting with pilot educational projects.
No experience necessary. Each intern’s precise work will depend on their personal interest, experience and skill as well as organizational need.
Interns must commit at least four hours per week, all or most of which time will be spent working directly with Learning Life founder, Dr. Paul Lachelier, and other interns at a regular time and day each week. Interns are also expected to participate in once-monthly Learning Life staff meetings via Skype, phone conference, or face-to-face.
The internship is unpaid, but available for credit or non-credit, as the intern prefers. Credit interns must secure a sponsoring professor then fulfill whatever academic requirements that professor expects for the course credit. Besides course credit, interns and volunteers alike can gain resume-building experience and a formal reference and/or recommendation letter given satisfactory performance.
HOW TO APPLY
Email your resume to Learning Life at inquiries@letlearninglive.org. We will then contact you to schedule an interview.
Dr. Ziad Munson:
Gary LaFree is Director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. START is currently engaged in approximately 40 research projects dealing mostly with the human causes and consequences of terrorism. Dr. LaFree is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), and a member of the National Academy of Science’s Crime, Law and Justice Committee. He has served as President of the ASC and of the ASC’s Division on International Criminology. Dr. LaFree has published more than 70 articles and three books. Much of Dr. LaFree’s current research is on trends in criminal and political violence.
Ziad Munson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University, where he founded and currently directs the Social Science Research Center. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1993 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996 and 2002. His research and teaching focuses on the intersection of popular mobilization, civic engagement, and religion. He is the author of The Making of Pro-Life Activists, a study of recruitment and mobilization in the American pro-life movement (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He has also authored articles and chapters on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, religion and politics in the U.S., and the role of civil society in wartime. He is currently working on a new project on the organizational infrastructure of international political violence. Click here for more on Dr. Munson’s teaching and research.
