American Journal

(Source: British Journal of Criminology - recent issues)

(Source: British Journal of Criminology - recent issues)

This paper conceptually examines one specific case of international terrorism, including the emergence and maintenance of membership-allegiance in its militant extremist group. This is the case of the Islamic Resistance Movement (or Hamas) and the manifestation of its corresponding Palestinian identity. Although the social person is constituted by symbols and objects, acts and social acts, meanings, and role-taking and role-making, questions persist about how best to promote peaceful coexistence, advance the interests of non-violence and ensure the protection of basic human rights. These practices constitute an ethic grounded in Aristotelian virtue. The delineation of key principles emanating from critical restorative justice helps to specify this brand of moral reasoning. The integration ...

Public attitudes towards the police are considered one of the important outcomes of policing in democratic countries. However, it is not clear how policing terrorism may affect these evaluations. The ‘Rally Effect’ provides a context for examining this question, and suggests that when faced with severe terrorism threats, public perceptions of the police will rise in the short term but decline over time. Utilizing this framework, this article examines fluctuations in attitudes of Jewish adults in Israel towards the police over the past decade, within the context of legitimacy and procedural justice. The results lend support for the hypothesized model, and suggest that in addition to police conduct, public attitudes toward the police may be influenced by larger social forces. (So...

In this study, we examine the impacts of terrorist threats on one aspect of police performance—the clearance of police files. Using Israel during the Second Intifada (2000–04) as a case study, we analyse the impact of level of terrorist threat, while controlling for other possible confounding factors, separating out communities that are primarily Jewish or Arab. Our analyses suggest that terrorist threats have a significant impact upon police performance, though that impact varies strongly by type of community. Higher levels of threat are associated with lower proportions of cleared cases in the majority Jewish communities, and higher proportions in the majority Arab communities. (Source: British Journal of Criminology - recent issues)

This article examines such production and attempts to delineate the limits to criminology in the analysis of political violence. By presenting interview extracts from a case study centred on violent political conflict in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, I demonstrate why criminology should seek supplementary explanatory categories within the broader realm of social theory, rather than rely exclusively on the theories and assumptions of traditional criminology. (Source: British Journal of Criminology - recent issues)

This study examines the range of terrorist action employed by ETA and the underlying psychological dimensions that distinguish between the conduct of their two main forms: assassinations and bombings. Descriptive accounts of incidents occurring between 1980 and 2007 are analysed for content and for the similarities and differences between the incidents represented, using Multidimensional Scalogram Analysis. The results show that incidents vary according to dimensions of victim targeting. For assassinations, these dimensions are proximity and specificity, whilst bombings vary in the level of ‘intent to harm’ and the type of victim. Correlational analysis reveals that the group goes through periods of increased and decreased activity involving all forms of action, rather than dis...

This article compares the background, motivation, pathways and prison experiences of Arab/Palestinian women who were imprisoned for conventional crimes with those who were incarcerated for security-related or terrorism offences. In-depth interviews of the two groups were conducted in the Israeli prisons in which they served their sentences. Prison personnel were also interviewed and court and prison files examined to validate the women's background and criminal history. Although both groups transgressed gender expectations by venturing into male-dominated worlds (crime and terrorism), the data point to differences between the groups regarding their personal background and the manner in which their violations were influenced by gender and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The implicat...

The history of international efforts to control the flow of funds to designated ‘terrorist groups’ via the formal financial system is examined. The work shows that—despite the high motivation of some governments and international banks to reduce terrorist attacks, which harm their citizens, customers, staff and profits—it remains difficult to determine how this private–public policing interface can rationally target ‘risky capital’. Financial intelligence efforts have had little externally discernible impact on reducing levels of terrorism or on criminal convictions. It reviews evaluation problems in knowing whether the apparent lack of effects is due to measurement failure (estimating how much terrorist harm might have occurred had the controls no...

Despite growing international concern about terrorism, until recently, very little was known about worldwide risk patterns for terrorist attacks. In this paper, we are especially interested in determining the extent to which terrorism is concentrated at the country level over time and whether different measures of terrorism (total, attributed and fatal attacks) yield similar results. Traditional sources of crime data—official police records and victimization and self-report crime surveys—typically exclude terrorism. In response, there has been growing interest in terrorist event databases. In this research, we report on the most comprehensive of these databases to date, formed by merging the Global Terrorism Database maintained by the START Center with the RAND-MIPT database. W...