Explaining radicalization, not just identifying terrorists, is the harder task

Evidence

But identifying terrorists is only half the job. The real challenge is to figure out why the Muslim community in Europe has become such a rich recruiting ground for Islamic extremists. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 867

Categorization

• SEED: A distinction worth mining: the difference between identifying who terrorists are and explaining the pipeline that produces them - a lens for many violence-related pieces.
• XREF: connects to: No single factor robustly drives radicalization across the sampled extremist cases — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 319; Despite theory treating radicalization as a process, most quantitative studies are cross-sectional — Lea Echelmeyer, Anne-Marie Slotboom, and Frank Weerman, The Putative Effect of Identity on…, 256