Understanding and dealing with terrorism: A classification of some contributions from the behavioral and social sciences.

Abstract

Publications concerned with terrorism are classified into the following categories: (a) general works and overviews; (b) effects on children and adolescents; (c) psychodynamic and other effects on adult victims; (d) crisis intervention; (e) emphasis on particular geographic locations; (f) specific forms (e.g., nuclear, biological, chemical); (g) understanding and dealing with terrorists; (h) interdisciplinary and special topics (e.g., interfaces with politics, history, ethics).Although most main areas of psychological research can inform our understanding of terrorism, this bibliography mainly features work that focuses fairly narrowly on this topic. The list of References-arranged in a customary single alphabet-is preceded by a classification scheme that includes a list of citations for each classification. These listings are meant to be "indicative" and to give a reasonable impression of the nature of relevant work but clearly are not exhaustive.For the context of peace psychology, see (e.g.) Christie, Wagner, and Winter (2001) and R. K. White (1986). For earlier bibliographies devoted to the psychology of peace but having entries relevant to terrorism, see for example: Blumberg and French (1992); Kramer and Moyer (1991);and Müller-Brettel (1993).Emphasis is here given to recent works that contain terrorism or terrorist(s) in their titles or subject indexing. Listings are based mainly on searches of three databases (as of

September 11, 2001: How can peace psychologists be most helpful?

“…In these pages (Volume 8, No. 1), we made a first effort, publishing Herbert Blumberg's (2002) culling of relevant research from electronic indexes of psychological publications, noting as well the pertinence of several other articles (Azar & Mullet, 2002;Suleiman, 2002) in that issue. We also made clear our hope that we would receive manuscripts concerning psychological aspects of terrorism.The desired flood of high quality articles has not materialized.…”