Terrorist ideology and behavior: An examination of the behavior of known and unknown perpetrators

The terrorist decision-making process is the key component of understanding the types of attacks terrorists execute, and the group's ideology is the goal-orientation portion of that rational decision-making process. Terrorist group ideology determines a number of aspects of the decision-making process that expand or limit the targets groups will attack and the tactics they will use to achieve their larger ideological goals. These aspects include: a group's long-term goals, short-term objectives, an attack's purpose, the audience, the group's constituency, its enemies, and its message. Terrorism is a tactic of asymmetrical warfare and a unique form of violent crime. Acts of terrorism and their perpetrators come in a variety of forms, each of which presents a different threat of violence, and occurs within a set of intricate circumstances.;Using a database of terrorist group ideologies of my own making, the Global Terrorism Database, Polity IV, the Political Instability Taskforce, and Major Episodes of Political Violence, I establish the link between terrorist ideology and terrorist behavior. I first established the number of terrorist perpetrators of each ideology type and evaluated the assassination, armed assault and bombing attacks they carried out against business, government, police, military and civilian targets. Second, I evaluated ideology's impact on terrorist behavior controlling for political violence and instability, geographic, time, and country and group-level variables. Finally, I evaluated the behavior of unknown terrorist perpetrators in the aggregate and over time between 1998 and 2013.;There are four major findings of this dissertation. First, there is a relationship between terrorist ideology and terrorist behavior. Second, some terrorist behaviors were consistent across ideologies and over time. Third, the geographic and political instability and violence context in which terrorism occurs affects terrorist behavior. Finally, the incidents committed by unknown perpetrators are geographically concentrated and their behavior patterns are similar to the general behaviors of identifiable perpetrators. Counterterrorism researchers and practitioners can use this information to anticipate and counter threats from terrorists of different ideologies and unknown perpetrators.