On Re-engagement and Risk Factors

We thank Marc Sageman for his interest in our article and are grateful to Terrorism and Political Violence for the opportunity to respond. Our study was part of a three-year grant-funded project entitled “Pathways, Processes, Factors, and Roles for Terrorist, Disengagement, Re-engagement, and Recidivism. ” The aim was to better understand individual-level disengagement from terrorism, as well as re-engagement and recidivism. We conducted two extensive reviews of literature from relevant disciplines—one on terrorist disengagement and another on terrorist re-engagement and recidivism. We then collected and analyzed data from a sample of autobiographies penned by individuals formerly involved in terrorist groups and conducted in-depth, in-person interviews with another sample of individuals who had left terrorist groups. The questionnaire and codebook that we developed to capture information from our autobiographical sample compiled data on subjects’ lives prior to their involvement in terrorism, important aspects of their involvement in terrorism including the nature of the groups they belonged to, and the conditions surrounding their disengagement and re-engagement and/or recidivism. An entire section of our questionnaire and codebook are dedicated to investigating not only whether individuals re-engaged, but the circumstances of that re-engagement and what we identified as hypothesized risk factors. We reiterate this because Sageman implies throughout his critique that we were using data that we originally compiled to study something else (disengagement) to then “derive a recidivism rate. ” We did not. Although our findings on disengagement were analyzed and published first, the purpose of the broader project was always to consider re-engagement and recidivism. This informed our review of relevant literature, generation of hypotheses, and the development of data collection protocols. A second issue Sageman raises is that our study cannot be used to “try to estimate a terrorist recidivism base rate for a specific country, time period, and cause. ” We are puzzled by this assertion. At no point do we ever state or imply that these findings can be used to approximate the recidivism base rate in the United States or any other specific context, nor should we be held responsible for attempts by others to misappropriate our findings to do so. We also never claim that our findings represent a “global” terrorist recidivism base rate. As part of our project, we conducted a comprehensive review of the literature on criminal recidivism and understood the methods and offender data necessary to establish a base rate. This is why we never use the term “base rate” when referencing our results. Rather, we present re-engagement and recidivism rates for our sample. We use the term “recidivism” to distinguish the re-engagement rate for the subset of our sample who reengaged after formal sanction (usually, imprisonment), not to provide a base rate. Further, we explicitly note the potential limitations Sageman raises with our sample in the original article where we write, “it could be that due to our reliance on autobiographies our sample underrepresents those with a very short window of involvement in terrorism who may be less likely to pen a memoir and reengage”. This misrepresentation of our work notwithstanding, we are grateful for the opportunity here to elaborate further on these issues. If our empirical interest was in establishing recidivism base rates, we most likely would have relied upon offender data and used reconviction as the benchmark for recidivism as is common in criminology, rather than re-engagement. Instead, our theoretical interest was in understanding how many individuals in our sample returned to their involvement in terrorism