| Identity has been a relatively popular theme in psychological-explanations of terrorism since the early 1980s. Its initial introduction relied upon neo-Freudian Erik Erikson's process of identification and contended that individuals who engaged in terrorism had adopted a negative identity that led them to seek solace in the collective identity of the extremist organization. Subsequent research argued that such individuals had a weak sense of identity or suffered from an incomplete or fragmented psychosocial identity. Ultimately, this has contributed to the portrayal of terrorists as flawed, abnormal, or psychopathic. However, more contemporary research has concluded that the exploratory power of these studies is limited and that terrorists are essentially normal individuals. Such conclusions warrant a reassessment of identity's influence on terrorist behavior. This endeavor relies upon structural symbolic interactionism and five of its organizing concepts (i.e., symbols, the definition of the situation, roles, socialization and role taking, and the self) to construct a conceptual framework for understanding identity. The framework is then used to examine how identities are created and maintained within five groups that utilize terrorism: the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Hamas, Shining Path, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and racist Skinheads. Although these groups do not account for all the terrorist attacks in the world, they do represent several diverse forms of terrorism (i.e., nationalist/separatist, religious, revolutionary, and racial/ethnic) from five distinct regions of the globe (i.e., Europe, the Middle East, South America, Asia, and North America). Therefore, understanding their behavior through this prism can help to shed light on other groups that exist and those that have yet to emerge. Implications are proposed in the areas of future terrorism research, counterterrorism operations, law and public policy, and the advancement of identity theory as it is understood through structural symbolic interactionism in assessing other forms of criminal behavior. |
