ABSTRACT What are the local political, economic, and social conditions of the communities that sent insurrectionists to the US Capitol in support of Donald Trump? Using a new dataset of the home counties of individuals charged for the Capitol insurrection, we tested two prominent theories of electoral populism and support for populist leaders like Donald Trump—demographic change and manufacturing decline—and whether they also explain violent populism. We also examined the effects of local political conditions. We find that white population decline is a stronger predictor of violent populism and that counties that voted for Trump were less likely to fight for Trump. The effect of white population decline is even greater in counties whose US House Representative rejected the 2020 election results. These findings suggest scholars should resist assuming violent populism is merely an extension of electoral populism, and solutions to one will not necessarily remedy the other.

Despite alarming predications about the Covid 19 pandemic that appear to fit the literature on the impact of natural disasters on civil wars, there are reasons to be suspicious that a rise in militant violence would likely occur quickly or uniformly. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is most definitely a disaster that caught the world by surprise, this "slow-rolling" shock differs in important ways from the more commonly studied acute onset natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis that often increase violent competition among groups for scarce resources. Instead, the effects of slow-rolling disasters unfold in phases that, at least in the short run, are likely to encourage a period of relative decline in violence, as actors try and assess the effects of COVID-19 on their organization and their opponents. Both statistical and qualitative evidence from the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic supports the initial phases of our theory.

The Islamist group ISIS has been particularly successful at recruiting Westerners as terrorists. A hypothesized explanation is their simultaneous use of two types of propaganda: Heroic narratives, emphasizing individual glory, alongside Social narratives, which emphasize oppression against Islamic communities. In the current study, functional MRI was used to measure brain responses to short ISIS propaganda videos distributed online. Participants were shown 4 Heroic and 4 Social videos categorized as such by another independent group of subjects. Persuasiveness was measured using post-scan predictions of recruitment effectiveness. Inter-subject correlation (ISC) was used to measure commonality of brain activity time courses across individuals. ISCs in ventral striatum predicted rated persuasiveness for Heroic videos, while ISCs in mentalizing and default networks, especially in dmPFC, predicted rated persuasiveness for Social videos. This work builds on past findings that engagement of the reward circuit and of mentalizing brain regions predicts preferences and persuasion. The observed dissociation as a function of stimulus type is novel, as is the finding that intersubject synchrony in ventral striatum predicts rated persuasiveness. These exploratory results identify possible neural mechanisms by which political extremists successfully recruit prospective members and specifically support the hypothesized distinction between Heroic and Social narratives for ISIS propaganda.

Why do some individuals with military experience support the insurrection of January 6? With US military veterans playing a central role in the assault on the US Capitol, answering this question is of immediate scholarly and policy concern. To better understand the impact of military service, we conducted the first nationally representative survey of support for pro-Trump anti-democratic violence ("insurrectionist sentiments") among US military veterans and a demographically matched sample of non-veterans. Our analysis finds veterans nearly twice as likely to hold high insurrectionist sentiments than non-veterans, and that military service increases support for restoring Trump to the presidency by force by 15 percent. Further, we find the effect veterancy is not fully explained by veterans being more likely to hold pro-Trump or conspiracy beliefs but is associated with negative military and post-service-related experiences. These findings are robust to significant unobserved confounding. We conclude with implications for future research on political violence and the role of the military in American democracy.

Why do some individuals engage in high-risk mobilization in support of foreign militant groups, willingly sacrificing their possessions and even their lives as “martyrs”, when there is no imminent threat to the community within which they live or strong ties to the communities for which they sacrifice? We develop a new theory of high-risk mobilization rooted in the use of narratives that explains high-risk mobilization and identify the revolutionary use of multiple martyrdom narratives among modern Islamic militant groups, especially a heroic narrative specifically tailored to Western audiences, that can explain the group’s broad appeal beyond traditional pools of recruits. We demonstrate the existence of the heroic narrative in the video propaganda of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra and apply our framework of narratives of martyrdom to the universe of ISIS recruitment videos. We conclude by discussing implications for scholarship on mobilization and counter-radicalization/recruitment policy.

This study presents an identity-centered narrative theory of high-risk political activism to explain how narratives engage with social identities, and how variation in narratives can be strategically deployed by political actors to engage different mobilization pools. Narratives are stories that persuade through identification with plot and characters, with mobilization bringing expressive payoffs. Narratives tailored to identities maximizes their recruitment potential. Our empirical case is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s Western-directed video recruitment campaign. We argue that ISIS’s use of tailored narratives explains its success in mobilizing diverse social identities within the community of Muslims living in the West. We present evidence for the theory from an online survey experiment with 139 US and Canadian Muslims and analyses of narratives in 16 ISIS propaganda videos and motives in 148 US ISIS perpetrators. The paper helps explain how appeals targeting identities can mobilize, including under circumstances of widespread social disapproval.

The power of airpower lies in its supreme ability to match the use of force to decisive weaknesses in an opponent’s military strategy. This power lies not so much in technology, the balance of forces between coercer and opponent, civil-military relations, or professional command and control over military forces, although each of these is critical to the successful use of coercive airpower that achieves vital political objectives without inflicting harm to no purpose. Effective airpower instead turns, fundamentally, on understanding the enemy.

The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats presents the updated and expanded Database on Suicide Attacks (DSAT), which now links to Uppsala Conflict Data Program data on armed conflicts and includes a new dataset measuring the alliance and rivalry relationships among militant groups with connections to suicide attack groups. We assess global trends in suicide attacks over four decades, and demonstrate the value of the expanded DSAT with special attention to the growing diffusion of suicide attacks in armed conflicts and the large role of networks established by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State through 2019 in this diffusion. Overall, the expanded DSAT demonstrates the advantages of integration across datasets of political violence for expanding research on important outcomes, generating new knowledge about the spread of particularly deadly forms of political violence, and raising important new questions about the efficacy of current policies to curb their spread.

The Islamic State (ISIS) was uniquely effective among extremist groups in the Middle East at recruiting Westerners. A major way ISIS accomplished this was by adopting Hollywood-style narrative structures for their propaganda videos. In particular, ISIS utilized a heroic martyr narrative, which focuses on an individual’s personal glory and empowerment, in addition to traditional social martyr narratives, which emphasize duty to kindred and religion. The current work presented adult participants (n = 238) video clips from ISIS propaganda which utilized either heroic or social martyr narratives and collected behavioral measures of appeal, narrative transportation, and psychological dispositions (egoism and empathy) associated with attraction to terrorism. Narrative transportation and the interaction between egoism and empathy predicted video recruitment appeal. A subset of adults (n = 80) underwent electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements while watching a subset of the video-clips. Complementary univariate and multivariate techniques characterized spectral power density differences when perceiving the different types of narratives. Heroic videos show increased beta power over frontal sites, and globally increased alpha. In contrast, social narratives showed greater frontal theta, an index of negative feedback and emotion regulation. The results provide strong evidence that ISIS heroic narratives are specifically processed, and appeal to psychological predispositions distinctly from other recruitment narratives.

Why are some people capable of sympathizing with and/or committing acts of political violence, such as attacks aimed at innocent targets? Attempts to construct terrorist profiles based on individual and situational factors, such as clinical, psychological, ethnic, and socio-demographic variables, have largely failed. Although individual and situational factors must be at work, it is clear that they alone cannot explain how certain individuals are radicalized. In this paper, we propose that a comprehensive understanding of radicalization and of how it may lead to political violence requires the integration of information across multiple levels of analysis and interdisciplinary perspectives from evolutionary theory, social, personality and cognitive psychology, political science and neuroscience. Characterization of the structural-functional relationships between neural mechanisms and the cognitive and affective psychological processes that underpin group dynamics, interpersonal processes, values and narratives, as well as micro-sociological processes may reveal latent drivers of radicalization and explain why some people turn to extreme political violence. These drivers may not be observable within a single individual level of scientific enquiry. The integrative, multilevel approach that characterizes social neuroscience has the potential to provide theoretical and empirical clarity regarding the antecedents of radicalization and support for extreme violence.

Does the religious calendar promote or suppress political violence in Islamic societies? This study challenges the presumption that the predominant impact of the Islamic calendar is to increase violence, particularly during Ramadan. This study develops a new theory that predicts systematic suppression of violence on important Islamic holidays, those marked by public days off for dedicated celebration. We argue that militant actors anticipate societal disapproval of violence, predictably inducing restraint on these days. We assess our theory using innovative parallel analysis of multiple datasets and qualitative evidence from Islamic insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan from 2004 to 2014. Consistent with our theory, we find that important Islamic holidays witness systematic declines in violenceas much as 41%and provide evidence that anticipation of societal disapproval is producing these results. Significantly, we find no systematic evidence for surges of violence associated with any Islamic holiday, including Ramadan.

High rates of missing perpetrator information in political violence data pose a serious challenge for studies into militant group behavior and the microdynamics of conflict more generally. In this article we introduce multiple imputation (MI) as the best available method for minimizing the impact of missing perpetrator information on quantitative analyses of political violence, a method that can easily be incorporated into most quantitative research designs. MI will produce unbiased attributions when the reasons for missingness are known and can be controlled for using observed variables, rendering responsibility for unclaimed attacks, “missing at random” (MAR) – which we show is a reasonable assumption in the case of political violence based on current theory of militant group claiming. We lay out the logics and steps of MI, identify variables and data sources, and demonstrate that MI produced better results in the case of the Pakistani Taliban’s response to drone strikes.