What drives some of those participants to actually plan or commit acts of terrorist violence? The Dutch 'Hofstadgroup' was active over ten years ago but remains a leading example of this form of terrorism in Europe and one that can still inform our thinking about the causes of this type of political violence.
Relying on interviews with former participants and the Dutch police files on the group, Bart Schuurman wrote a PhD thesis on the processes that led to involvement -and in some cases violence. During this seminar, he will present his key findings and argue that we need to move beyond 'radicalization'-based thinking and the use of secondary sources if we are to move our understanding of this form of terrorism forward.
Instead, Schuurman advances a multicausal and multilevel understanding of involvement in European homegrown jihadism which stresses that the factors that initiate involvement are separate from those that sustain it which in turn are again likely to differ from those that bring some individuals to actual acts of terrorism.
Bart Schuurman
Bart Schuurman is an assistant professor at Leiden University's Institute of Security and Global Affairs, which is based in the Hague. His research has focused on numerous topics related to contemporary jihadist terrorism, ranging from its causes to the pre-attack behavior of such groups. Bart completed his PhD in early 2017 and is currently rounding-off an EU-funded project on attack planning and preparation by lone actor extremists.