A Social Identity and Social Power Perspective on Terrorism

Abstract

This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding terrorism that is grounded in experimental work on social identity and social power. It is suggested that social identity salience and social power may be harnessed to reduce terrorist activity by reducing perceptions of threat from the view of terrorist organizations, by reducing perceived threat of terrorist activity from the view of potential targets, and by addressing distributions of and susceptibility to social power as it relates to acceptability of parochial altruism.

Keywords

• social identity
• social power
• terrorism
• counter-terrorism
• religious terrorism
• parochial altruism