The National Institute of Justice awarded the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) about $1.5 million for two research projects examining violent extremists’ radicalization and mobilization.
The projects, which will build off the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS), are designed to educate law enforcement and criminal justice professionals on strategies and best practices for terrorism prevention and extremist reintegration in their communities.
One of the research projects — The Mobilization Puzzle: How Individual, Group, and Situational Dynamics Produce Extremist Outcomes — aims to better understand the differences between radicalization indicators and mobilization indicators.
The research team – led by Gary LaFree and Michael Jensen – will create a database that includes information on approximately 700-1,000 U.S.-based extremist plots since 1990. This will make it possible to explore the radicalization characteristics, social-network dynamics, and event-level details concurrently.
“The really exciting part of this project is that it will allow us—for the first time—to achieve a more complete understanding of how terrorists mobilize by studying not only the individual and social characteristics that motivate people to act but also the capabilities, knowledge and situational dynamics that make action possible,” LaFree said.
The findings will be developed into an online training series to educate law enforcement and criminal justice professionals on the risk factors associated with violent extremism.
The other project — Risk and Rehabilitation: Supporting the Work of Probation Officers in the Community Reentry of Extremist Offenders — will study risk factors for recidivism among extremists and barriers to successful reintegration. These findings will also be incorporated into online training modules and toolkits for probation officers, criminal justice officials, and others who deal with extremists.