A Depreciated Tool for Combating Terrorism: Tactical Psychology

Terrorism is evolving rapidly, and with the
technological advancements new threats are emerging
from the ‘World of Terror'. Now, it has become crucial
than ever to evaluate and channelise our capabilities to
curb terrorism. This article evaluates the basics of
human behaviour and how it can be tactically used
against terrorism. The author has also addressed an
important question often raised among the terrorism
research community — ‘Who becomes a terrorist
The act of terror was first marked, when a Jewish
organisation, Sicarii, colluded to supplant Romans
who invaded their lands. However, the word
'Terrorism' came into existence during the French
Revolution in the late 1700s and gained popularity
during the 1970s with the formation of the Provisional
Irish Republican Army (PIRA). Terrorism is a relative
terminology, for some, it is an act against humanity;
and for others,the only possible explanation for justice.
Since many years, the international community and
social scientists have struggled dealing the complex
and multifaced aspects of terrorism. Literature review
suggests that there are broadly two lines of exploration
in the field of terrorism, ‘Psychology and genetics
based’ and ‘Defence operation based’. It is important
to note that, both lines of research will not complement
each other to effectively combat terrorism on the
ground level. Till date, psychologists and geneticists
have provided us with floating observations that have
no prognostic efficacy and currently there is no new
direction for further research. However, the defencebased
operations need definitive and scientifically
backed data to evaluate and tackle the threat posed by
terrorist organisations. Adding conundrum, there is
also a concern that many counter-terrorism agencies
refrain from sharing ground level data with researchers
citing security concerns. This gap has pushed the state
of terrorism research into dormancy. Hence, this article
is an attempt to find a new empirical approach for
countering terrorism. The human power of any
terrorist organisation is governed by personality traits,
they are intelligentially capable, manipulative,
tactically sophisticated and possess the ability to adapt
and evolve when faced with a threat; for example, with
the onset of technology and media, many terrorist
organisations have moved towards advertising and
recruiting through social media. It was found out
through a dataset study of ISIS twitter accounts, that
there were at least 170k twitter accounts labelled as
potential ISIS community twitter accounts just in the
year 2015 [4]. Hence, with all the abilities and
expertise the terrorist groups have, it is essential to
look at the organisation as a whole and not just the
ground crew, as the ground crew are a mere reflection
of mind-power the leadership possessesThe human
brain is a prodigious creation in the history of this
universe, what it can do or achieve has not been
studied to its fullest capacity yet. Unlike any other
technology, a human brain is not easy to hack and has
near to none loopholes. Geneticists are aware of most
of the protein-coding and regulatory genes specific to
the human brain but still cannot explain the complex
relationship between the ‘Human Brain' and its unique
set of cognitive processes which constitutes the
‘Human Mind'. Quite many researches have been
done, to find out genetic pre-disposition towards
violence and criminal behaviour. Literature review
points a positive correlation between a variant of
This work is partly presented at 23rd International Congress on neurology and Neurosurgery April 2-24, 2018, Rome Italy

Author(s): Vaishnavi Sharma

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