Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper offers a theory of decentralised, non-state-sponsored terrorism that is characteristic of contemporary reality, and that explains the rise of homegrown terrorism. We argue that the sense of social identity based on religion or shared history is a prime motivator of non-strategic terrorist activities, and we investigate its consequences and implications for defence against terrorism. Terrorist responses to perceived affronts to identity increase with altruism towards in-groups and with endogenous intensity of hate towards out-groups. We show that, while out-group spite is the more essential feature of identity pertinent to decentralised terrorism, the intensity of terrorist actions is magnified by in-group altruism because it plays an important role in overcoming the potential free-riding of terrorists. This makes individual terrorist activities possible without coordination. We use our formulation to provide an alternative explanation for why counterterrorism measures intended to deter and manage terrorism often fail, and frequently can have a backlash effect of actually increasing it. Our results point to the need for Western democracies to reformulate their foreign policies to take account of the role these policies play in instigating and managing contemporary terrorism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".