Terrorism, Psychology of

Abstract Terrorism is widely regarded as one of the most significant contemporary threats to global security. There continues to be significant disagreement, however, about how to define it. By the late 1980s, more than 100 definitions of terrorism had appeared in the professional literature. Criteria have often diverged across nations but are even known to differ across agencies within a given government. We will not resolve this debate here, but for the purposes of this article, the term terrorism refers to “acts of violence (as opposed to threats or more general coercion) intentionally perpetrated on civilian noncombatants with the goal of furthering some ideological, religious, or political objective (Borum, 2004). The focus here is also on terrorist actors (particularly nonstate actors), rather than on the psychological effects or consequences of terrorism.