ABSTRACT:This article provides an in-depth assessment of lone actor terrorists' attack planning and preparation. A codebook of 198 variables related to different aspects of pre-attack behavior is applied to a sample of 55 lone actor terrorists. Data were drawn from open-source materials and complemented where possible with primary sources. Most lone actors are not highly lethal or surreptitious attackers. They are generally poor at maintaining operational security, leak their motivations and capabilities in numerous ways, and generally do so months and even years before an attack. Moreover, the "loneness" thought to define this type of terrorism is generally absent; most lone actors uphold social ties that are crucial to their adoption and maintenance of the motivation and capability to commit terrorist violence. The results offer concrete input for those working to detect and prevent this form of terrorism and argue for a re-evaluation of the "lone actor" concept.

To move beyond current aggregate and static conclusions regarding radicalisation and subsequent terrorist behaviour, empirical research should look to criminological models which are influenced by the life course perspective.Current UK government policy designed to prevent radicalisation and terrorist engagement look to outputs from criminological perspectives to inform policy and practice. However, the guidance suffers from a lack of specificity as to the major concept of 'vulnerability to radicalisation', and what this incorporates. This investigation uses sequential analyses to add to our understanding of 'vulnerability' in the specific context of lone-actor terrorism. The statistical method bridges the gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches and provides a series of empirical outputs which visualise typical lone-actor terrorist trajectories through the discrete stages of radicalisation, attack planning and attack commission.

A wide range of studies investigating the nature and determinants of radicalisation, and terrorist-related behaviour exist. These, in turn, have influenced theory, policy and practice in areas concerned with violent extremism prevention, disruption and management. As such interventions become more common, debates rage within mental health professions about the role mental health practitioners should play in countering violent extremism. This systematic review assesses the impact of mental health problems upon attitudes, intentions and behaviours in the context of radicalisation and terrorism. We identified 25 studies that measured rates of mental health problems across 28 samples. The prevalence rates are heterogenous and range from 0% to 57%. If we pool the results of those samples (n=19) purely focused upon confirmed diagnoses where sample sizes are known (n=1705 subjects), the results suggest a rate of 14.4% with a confirmed diagnosis. Where studies relied upon wholly, or in some form, upon privileged access to police or judicial data, diagnoses occurred 16.96% of the time (n=283 subjects). Where studies were purely focused upon open sources (n=1089 subjects), diagnoses were present 9.82% of the time. We then explore (a) the types and rates of mental health disorders identified (b) comparison/control group studies (c) studies that explore causal roles of mental health problems and (d) other complex needs.

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Terrorists from a wide array of ideological influences and organizational structures consider security and risk on a continuous and rational basis. The rationality of terrorism has been long noted of course but studies tended to focus on organizational reasoning behind the strategic turn toward violence. A more recent shift within the literature has examined rational behaviors that underpin the actual tactical commission of a terrorist offense. This article is interested in answering the following questions: What does the cost-benefit decision look like on a single operation? What does the planning process look like? How do terrorists choose between discrete targets? What emotions are felt during the planning and operational phases? What environmental cues are utilized in the decision-making process? Fortunately, much insight is available from the wider criminological literature where studies often provide offender-oriented accounts of the crime commission process. We hypothesize similar factors take place in terrorist decision making and search for evidence within a body of terrorist autobiographies.

and Crime Science. Her research focusses on detecting dynamic patterns across a spectrum of grievance-fuelled violence to enhance the threat assessment of these types of offenders. She works as a research assistant on the ERC-funded Grievance project (see below).

Purpose. Behavioural crime linkage is underpinned by two assumptions: (a) that offenders exhibit some degree of consistency in the way they commit offences (their modus operandi [MO]); and, (b) that offenders can be differentiated on the basis of their offence behaviour. The majority of existing studies sample at most three crimes from an offender's series of detected crimes and do not examine whether patterns differ across offenders. Here, we examine patterns observed across the entire detected series of each sampled offender, and assess how homogeneous patterns are across offenders.Methods. Using a non-parametric resampling approach, we analyse the entire crime series of 153 prolific burglars to determine if they exhibit consistency and specificity in the way they commit offences.Results. Findings suggest that offenders exhibit consistency in the way they commit offences. With respect to specificity, our results suggest that patterns are not homogeneous across offenders or the type of MO considered -some offenders exhibit more specificity than do others, and offenders are more distinctive for some aspects of their MO (particularly spatial choices) than they are for others.Conclusions. The findings provide support for the underlying principles of crime linkage, but suggest that some aspects of an offender's MO either conform to a common preference, or are perhaps more influenced by situational factors than stable scripted preferences. That some offenders fail to demonstrate sufficient specificity for accurate linkage suggests that identifying which crimes are likely to be the work of offenders who display more specificity a priori constitutes one challenge for future research of this kind.