NEW International Speaker Series
Intermittent gloomy forecasts about the health of terrorism research continue to be proven inaccurate. Surveys of the literature, and of researchers themselves, offer much cause for optimism. Terrorism research now shines brightly, so much so it may be experiencing what Silke and Schmidt-Petersen suggested is its ‘golden age’.
Such progress notwithstanding, few would argue with John Morrison’s recent reminder that “there is still a long way to go”. For his forthcoming book, Terrorist Minds, John Horgan offers suggestions for where we might find more satisfactory (and useful) answers to several lingering questions around issues to do with who becomes a terrorist and why.
For this book, he first synthesized 50 years of research on the psychology of terrorist behavior, concluding in part by making explicit the limitations of psychological enquiry. That, in turn, led to the development of a new model of terrorist behavior. Informed by the study of tornadoes, as well as those who study them (several of whom were interviewed as part of this new work), Horgan argues that the study of tornadoes provides opportunities to address long-standing issues in terrorist psychology as well as several new insights.
Speaker bio:
John Horgan is Distinguished University Professor at Georgia State University’s Department of Psychology where he also directs the Violent Extremism Research Group (VERG). His work is widely published, with books including The Psychology of Terrorism (now in its second edition and published in over a dozen languages worldwide), Divided We Stand: The Strategy and Psychology of Ireland’s Dissident Terrorists; Walking Away from Terrorism, Leaving Terrorism Behind, and Terrorism Studies: A Reader. He is an Editor of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence, Consulting Editor of American Psychologist, Consulting Editor of Psychology of Violence, Contributing Editor of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and serves on the Editorial Boards of several additional publications including Politics and the Life Sciences, Legal and Criminological Psychology, Journal for Deradicalization, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict and Journal of Strategic Security.
He is a member of the Research Working Group of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. He has held positions at the University of Massachusetts (Lowell), Penn State, University of St. Andrews, and University College, Cork. His research has been featured in such venues as The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, CNN, PBS, NPR, Vice News, Rolling Stone Magazine, TIME, Nature, Scientific American and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Horgan’s latest book, Terrorist Minds, will be published by Columbia University Press in 2022.