Terrorists are just another type of criminal

Within the research literature, terrorism is traditionally treated as a political problem, not a criminal one. Correspondingly, whereas these studies traditionally focused upon the rational adoption of terrorism as a strategy or a tactic, they typically do not look at the ‘rationality’ underpinning the actual commission of a terrorist offence – a key component of crime science. This chapter is structured around the following questions: ‘why do people commit terrorist acts’; ‘where, when and how does terrorism occur’ and ‘how do we prevent terrorism’. The chapter draws from the environmental criminology literature and wider fields. The first section ‘why do people commit terrorist acts’ outlines the existing literature related to risk factors for terrorist involvement and differing terrorist roles. The second section ‘where, when and how does terrorism occur’ discusses spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal patterns of terrorism and how patterns found for urban criminal acts such as distance decay are reflected in terrorism. The third section ‘how do we prevent terrorism’ applies the five basic prevention mechanisms - increase the effort, increase the risk, reduce rewards, reduce provocations, and remove excuses – to the prevention of terrorist acts