Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism

rdf:langString Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism

rdf:langString Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism is a 2017 book about lone wolf terrorism co-authored by Mark Hamm, a criminologist at Indiana State University and Ramon Spaaij, a sociologist at Victoria University, Australia. According to a review in Times Higher Education that described Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism as an "genuinely indispensable study of today's steadily increasing terrorist threat," the book's "pivotal contention" that the radicalization of lone wolf terrorists exhibits discernible patterns that include “the integration of personal and political grievances; an affinity with online sympathizers and/or extremist groups," and "triggering events that, oftentimes, cause a dramatic change in behavior”. Hamm and Spaaij constructed a database funded by the United States Department of Justice in which they identified 124 instances of lone wolf terrorist attacks in the United States between 1940 and 2016; the list includes "about" 30 planned attacks that are known not to have been carried out, or that have been identified as FBI sting operations, or as hoaxes. Hamm and Spaaij defined lone wolf terrorism narrowly; they required an attacker to be politically motivated. This excluded, for example, mass shooters such as Adam Lanza, whose motive appeared to be entirely personal. Also, they had to have acted entirely alone, excluding cases like the 2015 San Bernardino attack carried out by a married couple, and the Boston Marathon bombing, carried out by a pair of brothers. The tightness of this definition was widely criticized.