Toward An Integrated Behavioral Framework for Analyzing Terrorism: Individual Motivations to Group Dynamics

By building on a theoretical framework, which expands rational choice theory to include group-based motivations, this paper offers an integrated behavioral model for analyzing terrorism. This model is used to understand the life cycle of a terrorist group; their formation and demise and also their transformation from ideological groups to criminal gangs and vice versa. For understanding terrorism, it is not essential to offer a strict functional model of human motivations. However, in this article, I argue that if we must, we should expand the rational choice model to include the primordial human urge of belonging to a group