Volume 14, Issue 6 (December 2020)
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ISSN 2334-3745 Volume XIV, Issue 6 December 2020 Special Issue Restraint in Terrorist Groups and Radical Milieus Guest Editors Joel Busher and Tore Bjørgo PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 14, Issue 6 Table of Contents Welcome from the Editors...............................................................................................................................1 Articles Restraint in Terrorist Groups and Radical Milieus: Towards a Research Agenda.........................................2 by Joel Busher and Tore Bjørgo Non-Involvement in Terrorist Violence: Understanding the Most Common Outcome of Radicalization Processes........................................................................................................................................................14 by Bart Schuurman Learning from the Lack of Political Violence: Conceptual Issues and Research Designs...........................27 by Leena Malkki Why the Nordic Resistance Movement Restrains Its Use of Violence..........................................................37 by Tore Bjørgo and Jacob Aasland Ravndal The Internal Brakes on Violent Escalation within the British Extreme Right in the 1990s........................49 by Graham Macklin On the Permissibility of Homicidal Violence: Perspectives from Former US White Supremacists...........65 by Steven Windisch, Pete Simi, Kathleen M. Blee, and Matthew DeMichele Internal Debates, Doubts and Discussions on the Scope of Jihadi Violence: The Case of the Turnup Terror Squad..................................................................................................................................................77 by Donald Holbrook A Downward Scale Shift? The Case of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham......................................................................91 by Silvia Carenzi Crossing the Rubicon: The Limits of Insurgent Violence in Kabardino-Balkaria....................................106 by Mark Youngman Violence and Restraint within Antifa: A View from the United States......................................................122 by Nigel Copsey and Samuel Merrill From the Armed Struggle against the Dictatorship to the Socialist Revolution: The Narrative Restraints to Lethal Violence among Radical Left Organisations in Portugal............................................................139 by Raquel da Silva and Ana Sofia Ferreira Reality Check: The Real IRA’s Tactical Adaptation and Restraint in the Aftermath of the Omagh Bombing......................................................................................................................................................152 by John Morrison The Dynamics of Restraint in the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty Campaign......................................165 by Rune Ellefsen and Joel Busher Understanding Peace and Restraint amidst Ethnic Violence: Evidence from Kenya and Kyrgyzstan.....180 by Sarah Jenkins ISSN 2334-3745 I December 2020 PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 14, Issue 6 Resources Counterterrorism Bookshelf: 20 Books on Terrorism & Counter- Terrorism-Related Subjects..............193 Reviewed by Joshua Sinai Bibliography: Defining and Conceptualizing Terrorism...........................................................................204 Compiled and selected by Judith Tinnes Recent Online Resources for the Analysis of Terrorism and Related Subjects..........................................237 Compiled and selected by Berto Jongman Announcements Conference Monitor/Calendar of Events (December 2020)......................................................................266 Compiled by Reinier Bergema About Perspectives on Terrorism.................................................................................................................270 ISSN 2334-3745 II December 2020 PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 14, Issue 6 Words of Welcome from the Editors Dear Reader, We are pleased to announce the release of Volume XIV, Issue 6 (December 2020) of Perspectives on Terrorism (ISSN 2334-3745). Our independent online journal is an Open Access publication of the Terrorism Research Initiative (TRI), Vienna, and the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) of Leiden University’s Campus in The Hague. All past and recent issues are freely available online at the following URL:https://www. universiteitleiden.nl/perspectives-on-terrorism. Perspectives on Terrorism (PoT) is indexed by JSTOR, SCOPUS, and Google Scholar. Now in its fourteenth year, it has more than 9,200 registered subscribers and many more occasional readers and website visitors in academia, government and civil society worldwide. The articles of its six annual issues are fully peer-reviewed by external referees (double-blind) while all other content is subject to internal editorial quality control. This last issue of 2020 is aSpecial Issue, edited by Joel Busher (Coventry University) and Tore Bjørgo (C_ REX, University of Oslo) on the topic ‘Restraint in Terrorist Groups and Radical Milieus’. It features 14 articles by twenty (co-)authors and is based mainly on a workshop held at the Centre for Research on Extremism (C-REX) in Oslo in January 2020, and two subsequent panels organised for conferences of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) and the Society for Terrorism Research (STR). The articles cover right-wing, left-wing as well as religious and other types of terrorism and radical militancy, making use of a common conceptual framework as the guest editors explain in their introductory article. These articles are followed by the usual Resources and Announcements section with its standard features: • the CT Bookshelf wherein our Book Reviews Editor Joshua Sinai provides abbreviated reviews of new publications; • an extensive bibliography, this time on the perennial question how terrorism should be defined, compiled by Associate Editor Judith Tinnes; • the regular overview of new web-based resources on terrorism and related subjects by Associate Editor Berto Jongman; and • the Conference Calendar by Associate Editor Reinier Bergema and Editorial Assistant Olivia Kearney. The articles and other texts of the current issue ofPerspectives on Terrorism have been reviewed and prepared for publication by Alex Schmid and James Forest, the journal’s principal editors, while the technical online launch of the December 2020 issue of our journal has been in the hands of Associate Editor for IT Christine Boelema Robertus at the Hague Campus of Leiden University. ISSN 2334-3745 1 December 2020 PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 14, Issue 6 Restraint in Terrorist Groups and Radical Milieus: Towards a Research Agenda by Joel Busher and Tore Bjørgo Abstract Questions about why and how terrorist groups, radical milieus and the individuals that comprise them do not carry out more violence than they do – particularly when they apparently have the ability and opportunity to do so – have tended to receive less scholarly attention than questions about what leads towards violence or why it abates. Yet if we look closely at almost any group, we can usually find evidence of some kind of restraint taking place, whether in the form of limitations on what or who is deemed an ‘appropriate’ target, or placing limits on the scale or style of violence that militants should deploy. This Special Issue ofPerspectives on Terrorism, for which this article comprises the introduction, responds to this state of affairs by bringing together a series of articles that focus specifically on the issue of restraint within terrorist groups and radical milieus. This article provides a brief conceptual sketch of restraint, and makes the case that paying greater attention to restraint can offer rich rewards for researchers, policymakers and practitioners concerned with understanding and responding to political violence associated with terrorist groups and radical milieus, as well as other forms of political violence. Keywords: restraint; terrorism; radical milieus; limits on violence; political violence Introduction While scholars of terrorism and radical milieus have made significant advances in understanding the onset and escalation of violence,[1] how such violence declines or ends,[2] and why and how militants deradicalise and disengage,[3] they have made less progress in understanding how and why these groups, and the individuals that comprise them, do not carry out more violence than they do, particularly when they apparently have the ability and opportunity to do so.[4] Where this issue has perhaps received most attention has been in the literature concerned with the effectiveness of otherwise of violent and non-violent campaigns: a literature that indicates that part of the reason militants hold back from further escalation of violence is likely to be that such violence is often at best ineffective and at worse counter-productive.[5] Yet even here, this literature tells us relatively little about restraint as a process: about where, when and how it emerges, gains traction, diffuses through the group or organisation or, indeed, where, when and how it does not. That this is the case is perhaps unsurprising. Within much of the research on terrorism and radical milieus, there are a number of conceptual and methodological factors that direct our attention away from questions about how and why such actors do not engage in more violence. These include the tendency to focus more attention on cases where violence reaches the thresholds required for inclusion in existing databases than those where it does not;