This project helps academic researchers and security, law enforcement and intelligence analysts develop a better understanding of decision-making within extremist or terrorist groups/movements by enabling analysis of a largely neglected dimension of their decision-making: the mechanisms through which group members themselves seek to inhibit or set parameters around the adoption of new or more extreme forms of violence – what we refer to as the ‘internal brakes’ on violent escalation.

In this project we develop a descriptive typology of these internal brakes. We do this by drawing both on a review of the general published literature on decision-making within terrorist or extremist groups, as well as through the development of case studies of three groups/movements with very different ideological underpinnings and characterised by very different levels of violence: the transnational and British jihadi movement between 2001 and 2016; the British extreme right in the 1990s; and the animal liberation movement in the UK from the mid-1970s until the early 2000s.

For academic researchers, the project provides new insight about the dynamics of non- or limited-escalation, a hitherto under-researched issue – and enables the development of formal hypotheses about how ‘internal brakes’ work, where, when and why: a crucial step in gaining a deeper understanding about the patterns of terrorist or extremist activities and how, ultimately, violence can be more effectively inhibited.

For security, intelligence and law enforcement practitioners, the typology provides a tool that can be used to refine understanding about the propensity towards and away from violence by particular groups or sub-groups, and assess how externally applied counter-measures might interact with, and sometime undermine, internal brakes.

Project resources

The Internal Brakes on Violent Escalation within the British Extreme Right in the 1990s

It is perhaps counter-intuitive to ponder why the extreme right milieu, which regularly espouses violent apocalyptic jeremiads regarding the impending threat to race and nation, has not generated as much violence as it would appear capable of. This article explores this question, using a case study of the British extreme right in the 1990s, a period in which there was violent street conflict with anti-fascist activists. It focusses in particular upon the British National Party, as that organisation sought to become a legitimate political party whilst simultaneously being entangled in violent street confrontations with anti-fascists, on the one hand, and conflict with militants on its own “radical flank” who baulked at the party’s new direction, on the other. Specifically, this article explores the role internal rather than external “brakes” might have played in limiting violent escalation in a “scene” in which a certain level of violence was endemic. Utilising the typology of “internal brakes” developed by Busher, Macklin and Holbrook, which highlights five distinct, though often overlapping, “logics” that work to restrain violent escalation, the article discusses the processes that worked to restrain rather than escalate violence. It does so in order to demonstrate how this typology can be used as an analytical tool for conceptualising how the internal restrains on violence might function within other political milieu as well.

(From the journal abstract)


Macklin G., (2020). The Internal Brakes on Violent Escalation within the British Extreme Right in the 1990s. Perspectives on Terrorism, 14 (6), pp. 49-64

Author: Graham Macklin
https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/85237/2/macklin.pdf

Subscribe to the CREST newsletter.

Get the latest news, events and research into security threats delivered directly to your inbox.
Sign up now
Back to top