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Radicalization Trajectories: An Evidence-Based Computational Approach to Dynamic Risk Assessment of “Homegrown” Jihadists

NCJ Number
304906
Journal
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism Volume: 43 Issue: 7 Dated: 2020
Date Published
2020
Annotation

This research aimed to develop and test a new dynamic approach to preventive risk assessment of violent extremists.

Abstract

The well-known New York Police Department four-phase model was used as a starting point for the conceptualization of the radicalization process, and time-stamped biographical data collected from court documents and other public sources on American homegrown Salafi-jihadist terrorism offenders were used to test the model. Behavioral sequence patterns that reliably anticipate terrorist-related criminality were identified and the typical timelines for the pathways to criminal actions estimated for different demographic subgroups in the study sample. Finally, a probabilistic simulation model was used to assess the feasibility of the model to identify common high-frequency and high-risk sequential behavioral segment pairs in the offenders’ pathways to terrorist criminality. (Publisher Abstract Provided)

Date Published: January 1, 2020