International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 62

International Journal on Criminology
who sought to attack their country of residence. The majority of these
individuals began as ‘unremarkable’—they had ‘unremarkable’ jobs, had
lived ‘unremarkable’ lives and had little, if any criminal history.
The threat now comes from hybrid groups and opportunists capable of rapid
transformation. There is a new criminal melting pot combining religious fanaticism,
massacres, piracy, and trafficking in people, drugs, arms, toxic substances, and diamonds.
We are seeing the emergence of a spectrum of criminal terrorism, a kind of gangsterrorism,
involving people who no longer fit into the neat pigeonholes so cunningly prepared for
them. Lacking the imagination to grasp such complexities, the bureaucratic structures
try desperately to make the realities fit in with their view of how things should be. But the
realities rarely oblige.
In the United States, Canada, Belgium, Israel, and France, we are now seeing
microattacks, generally carried out by one or two operators armed with whatever comes to
hand—knives, machetes, or vehicles, and sometimes hunting weapons or the equipment
typical of small-time crooks and, less frequently, automatic weapons.
A new terrorism has come into being. The core of which is made up of radical
Islamists who have perverted their religion, but there are also nonideological groups, such
as mafia-style gangs, who are willing, particularly in the Sahel, to act as subcontractors,
while maintaining their own trafficking activities.
Hundreds of young people, caught between two cultures—born or raised in the
West, but unsure of their roots—have set off to fight in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia,
Syria, and Libya, and they do it in the name of a cause and of a faith, taking part in a war
they did not start, in a struggle they believe to be just. The question we must ask is not
about what to call them (terrorists, resistance fighters, combatants), but about the way in
which their eventual return and the danger they potentially represent can be managed.
The appearance of the lumpenterrorists is more worrying. They provoke the same
media outcry as much more serious attacks, but most significantly, early detection of
them is extremely difficult.
Faced with the increasing difficulties of planning operations in the West, the big
players of amorphous Jihad have turned to inciting isolated individuals to act in their
stead, using whatever means they have at their disposal. It is not accurate to describe
these people as “lone wolves”—the unthinking use of this catchall term in the fight against
terrorism actually adds to the general confusion.
They may share the same interests or the same “faith,” but the “lone wolf” depends
on no other person. According to Ramon Spaaij:
Lone wolves are characterized by the fact that . . . they operate individually
[and] . . . do not belong to an organized terrorist group or network . . . and their
modi operandi are conceived and directed by the individual without any direct
outside command or hierarchy. . . . The lone wolf terrorist is typically someone
who acts out of strong political, religious, or ideological conviction, carefully
plans his or her actions, and may successfully hide his or her operations from
those around them.
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