Terrorism and Prejudice – Known and Unknown Causalities
Author(s): Damir Bevanda / Language(s): English
Keywords: terrorism; violence; power; prejudice; causalities;
Prejudice based on national, ethnic, racial, religious, class or similar differences that divide people into groups pervade human life. For the most part, human history is marked by conflicts between different groups that often resulted in horrible and mass atrocities because of prejudice. As can be seen from recent history that we witnessed, such conflicts continue and it seems that the intensity of ethnic, religious or other conflicts is not decreasing. Only the means and forms of conflict change. Prejudice has always been the driver of various forms of hostility, ranging from discrimination to war crimes. Terrorism is generally considered the peacetime equivalent of a war crime (Horgan, 2005a). This book is an attempt to answer the question to what extent is prejudice the driving force behind involvement in terrorism. Terrorism became the dominant form of violent political struggle of the weak against the strong in the last century, especially since the 1970s. The legal confrontation with phenomenon of terrorism has been going on an entire century. For half a century, terrorism has been intensively studied in a multidisciplinary manner. And yet, even the first step, defining terrorism, did not yield concrete results in terms of a consensual, generally accepted, unique definition. Phenomenological research on terrorism has offered a number of classifications and typologies that have helped the understanding of terrorism. Etiology has offered a series of theories about the causes of terrorism that have been accepted, re-examined, rejected, upgraded, changed, etc. The concept of radicalisation has changed the ways of understanding the individual becoming a terrorist. The question of why someone becomes a terrorist has been transformed into the question of how someone becomes a terrorist. Among the numerous theories about the causes of terrorism, the impact of prejudice against certain groups has not been established or investigated so far. Therefore, it constitutes an unexplored causality. On the other hand, the cause-and-effect connection between terrorism and the growth of prejudice has been repeatedly investigated and empirically proven, in such a way that a terrorist act leads to an increase in prejudice against the actual or perceived ethnic, religious, etc. group of the terrorist. In general, terrorism research is marked by a lack of empirical data. For years, terrorism researchers and security experts have lamented the lack of primary data to understand terrorism (Braddock, 2019). Despite these complaints, most terrorism researchers have not presented primary data, used the rigorous scientific methods of the social sciences, or the benefits of statistical analysis. Sageman (2008) spoke critically about the scientific challenges of researching terrorism, stating that science is not a set of beliefs but a methodological procedure that tests hypotheses. In this sense, a large number of authors researching terrorism have concentrated on the cases of Osama bin Laden, the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 or the terrorist act in Bali in 2002. Researchers have erred in making generalisations based on individual cases. Other authors have used selective information, selecting facts that support their arguments while ignoring facts that contradict them.
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