Terrorism, Multidimensionalism, and Myopia’

Assigning responsibility for terrorist actions requires, among other things, understanding of the factors that motivate and entrench terrorist beliefs. This chapter endorses a normative approach to the epistemology of terrorism called multidimensionalism, focusing on etiological questions about the sources and causes of terrorist beliefs. The chapter offers a description of multidimensionalism informed by recent work by Quassim Cassam, exemplified in terrorism studies by Richard English and Lisa Stampnitzky, among others. When etiological studies of terrorist beliefs fail to be properly multidimensional, they run the risk of becoming epistemically myopic, a concept elaborated in terms of failures of explanatory breadth and depth. The dangers of epistemic myopia are illustrated with a critical discussion of two influential models of the etiology of terrorism, the radicalization model and the rational agent model. The author concludes that properly multidimensional approaches to the etiology of terrorism are vital to attempts to assign responsibility for terrorist actions.