The collaboration between ISPI and BBC News continues through the BBC’s “Expert Panel” initiative, which seeks to bring together major international think tanks and research centers.
Through this initiative, BBC News hopes to bring its readers around the world an exhaustive set of testimonies, data, and analyses from field experts, in order to be able to look past the news and better understand current events.
After a first article, which was published this past June, today and article titled “Who was behind the jihadist attack on Europe and North America?” was published on the BBC News website. The new article features updated data from the past collaboration, in light of the terrorist attacks that occurred during the summer months. The findings presented are drawn from the ISPI study “Fear thy Neighbor. Radicalization and Jihadist Attacks in the West”.
The ISPI report, realized in collaboration with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague, is available both in English and Italian.
In the past three years, Europe and North America have been hit by an unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks carried out by jihadist extremists. Who were the authors of these attacks? Were they born in the West or were they migrants and refugees? How did they radicalize? Were they well integrated in their respective societies or did they remain on the fringes? How did they radicalize? Did they act alone? What were their connections with the Islamic State?
These are all important interrogatives that need to be answered in order to comprehend the nature of this menace, and to identify the necessary policy measures that need to be taken, through the analysis of empirical evidence. The study is a first of its kind, and seeks to identify the demographic profiles, radicalization processes, and ties to the Islamic State, of the individuals who have carried out jihadist terrorist attacks in Europe and North America since the declaration of the Caliphate in June of 2014.
