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What Makes a Terrorist?
James Q. Wilson
Terrorism, like the plague in the Middle Ages, frightens both leaders and citizens. It is a disease 
that is spreading; its cure is unknown. Terrorism, however motivated, baffles people, because they 
cannot imagine doing these things themselves. This bafflement often leads us to assume that ter-
rorists are either mentally deranged or products of a hostile environment.
In a powerful essay, Cynthia Ozick describes “the barbarous Palestinian societal invention”: re-
cruiting children to blow themselves up. She argues that these are acts of “anti-instinct,” because 
they are contrary to the drive to live, the product of a grotesque cultural ideal. She is correct to say 
that this recruitment is not psychopathological, but not quite right to say that it defies instinct. It 
defies some instincts but is in accord with others.
To explain why people join these different groups, let me make some distinctions. One, is be-
tween anarchic ideologues and nationalists.
Ideological terrorists offer up no clear view of the world they are trying to create. They speak 
vaguely about bringing people into some new relationship with one another but never tell us 
what that relationship might be. Their goal is destruction, not creation. 
By contrast, nationalistic and religious terrorists are a very different matter. The fragmentary 
research that has been done on them makes clear that they are rarely in conflict with their par-
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ents; on the contrary, they seek to carry out in extreme ways ideas learned at home. Moreover, 
they usually have a very good idea of the kind of world they wish to create: it is the world given 
to them by their religious or nationalistic leaders. These leaders, of course, may completely 
misrepresent the doctrines they espouse, but the misrepresentation acquires a commanding 
power.
Marc Sageman at the University of Pennsylvania has analyzed what we know so far about 
members of al-Qaida. Unlike ideological terrorists, they felt close to their families and described 
them as intact and caring. They rarely had criminal records; indeed, most were devout Muslims. 
The great majority were married; many had children. None had any obvious signs of mental dis-
order. The appeal of al-Qaida was that the group provided a social community that helped them 
define and resist the decadent values of the West. The appeal of that community seems to have 
been especially strong to the men who had been sent abroad to study and found themselves 
alone and underemployed.
A preeminent nationalistic terrorist, Sabri al-Bana (otherwise known as Abu Nidal), was born 
to a wealthy father in Jaffa, and through his organization, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, also 
known as the Abu Nidal Organization, sought to destroy Israel and to attack Palestinian leaders 
who showed any inclination to engage in diplomacy. He was hardly a member of the wretched 
poor.
That terrorists themselves are reasonably well-off does not by itself disprove the argument that 
terrorism springs from poverty and ignorance. Terrorists might simply be a self-selected elite, who 
hope to serve the needs of an impoverished and despondent populace — in which case, provid-
ing money and education to the masses would be the best way to prevent terrorism.
From what we know now, this theory appears to be false. Researchers compared terrorist inci-
dents in the Middle East with changes in the gross domestic product of the region and found that 
the number of such incidents per year increased as economic conditions improved. On the eve 
of the intifada that began in 2000, the unemployment rate among Palestinians in the West Bank 
and Gaza Strip was falling, and the Palestinians thought that economic conditions were improving. 
The same economic conditions existed at the time of the 1988 intifada. Terror did not spread as the 
economy got worse but as it got better.
This study agrees with the view of Franklin L. Ford, whose book Political Murder covers ter-
rorist acts from ancient times down to the 1980s. Assassinations, he finds, were least common in 
fifth-century Athens, during the Roman republic, and in eighteenth-century Europe — periods 
in which “a certain quality of balance, as between authority and forbearance” was reinforced by 
a commitment to “customary rights.” Terrorism has not corresponded to high levels of repression 
or social injustice or high rates of ordinary crime. It seems to occur, Ford suggests, in periods of 
partial reform, popular excitement, high expectations, and impatient demands for still more rapid 
change.
If terrorists — suicide bombers and other murderers of innocent people — are not desperate, 
perhaps they are psychologically disturbed. But I cannot think of a single major scholar who has 
studied this matter who has found any psychosis. Terrorists are likely to be different from non-
terrorists, but not because of any obvious disease.
In short, recruiting religiously inspired or nationalistically oriented terrorists seems to have 
little to do with personal psychosis, material deprivation, or family rejection. It may not even have 
much to do with well-known, high-status leaders. Among West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, for 
example, there is broad support for suicide bombings and a widespread belief that violence has 
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