Bringing the War Home : A Psycho-Historical Exploration of How Right- Wing, Lone Wolf Terrorist’s Construct Group Identities in the 21st Century

Abstract: Contemporary social and political discourses often emphasise the security threat of Jihadism towards Europe and the United States as the main terrorist threat. Two decades into the twenty-first century, however, the new threat of right-wing terrorism has emerged as the statistically most prominent form of terror. As these attacks are predominantly carried out through so-called lone wolf tactics, it becomes essential to understand how these actors operate. While there is a growing amount of empirical literature that seeks to understand this phenomenon of lone-wolf terrorism, many follow similar frameworks with explanatory models which are dependent on assumptions and common truisms, such as that lone wolves are loners with depressive personality disorders who are cultivated in a vacuum independent from social ties. This study instead explores group psycho-historical factors through the theoretical framework of Symbolic Convergence Theory, which is applied through discourse analysis. The research thus aims to identify group fantasies and grand narratives which ties these lone wolves to a community on which they depend upon in radicalisation and subsequently, in carrying out the attacks. The findings consequently suggest that the typology of lone wolf terrorism is misleading as the subjects indicate a group consciousness with a cohesiveness which grows stronger as they increasingly interpret a growing danger towards their community dependent on commonly recurring fantasies and narratives.