In the book, Spaaij examines the key trends, features and dimensions of lone wolf terrorism, explores what drives the lone wolf to commit mass violence and discusses how this might be effectively countered. Among these are 198 incidents by 88 ‘solo-actor’ terrorists, in which 123 people were killed across 15 Western countries – including the US, home of the radical right-wing lone wolf. The two databases collectively contain 11,235 terrorist incidents, including failed attempts, between 19. “I checked these for corroborating evidence and found cases in Russia and Germany where the perpetrators were individuals but who I then discovered were connected to groups such as neo-Nazi gangs so they were excluded.”Īmong other sources, Spaaij used the Global Terrorism Database which, since 2008, has been hosted by the national consortium for the study of terrorism research centre at the University of Maryland, alongside the Terrorism Knowledge Base. “I started the research with information drawn from global terrorism databases and used that to identify likely examples of lone wolf terrorists,” he says. This event led to American publisher Springer asking Spaaij to write a book that would explain why such solitary killers acted the way they did. Then came the tragedy that unfolded in Norway on the afternoon of 22 July last year, when Anders Breivik detonated a bomb that killed eight people in the centre of Oslo and later, disguised as a police officer, gunned down 69 young people attending a Labour Party youth camp.
This was a large-scale, US$1 million project covering terrorist acts in 10 European countries, as well as in Australia, Britain, Canada, Russia and the United States between 1968 – when the first international records of terrorism incidents began to be compiled – and 2010.ĭuring his research, Spaaij realised that almost no studies had been done on lone terrorists. His latest book follows on from research he and colleagues conducted between 20, for the European Commission, on transnational terrorism. Spaaij is a senior research fellow in the school of social sciences at La Trobe and at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. He summarises his findings in a new book Understanding Lone Wolf Terrorism: Global patterns, motivations and prevention – the first in-depth analysis of such terrorism worldwide over the past four decades.
The latest awful incident of multiple murders by an individual occurred last week in America, when 40-year-old army veteran Wade Michael Page (pictured) killed six people inside a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and was then shot to death himself by the police.Īuthorities described the incident as an “act of domestic terrorism” and said Page had been linked to white supremacist groups.Īt La Trobe University in Melbourne, sociologist Dr Ramon Spaaij has been researching terrorism for 10 years and for the past five has focused on terrorists who act alone – the so-called lone wolves. From Australia to Azerbaijan, Finland to France, Norway to The Netherlands, Xinjiang to the United States, solitary gunmen down the decades have opened fire on the innocent in pursuit of specific goals. Tweet In the long roll call of ‘lone wolf’ terrorist attacks, few countries have been spared.
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