Lone Wolf Terrorism Summary

In this article titled, “Endgame? Sports Events as Symbolic Targets In Lone Wolf Terrorism” Ramón and Mark S. Hamm attempt to identify and discusses what causes terrorist to target major sporting events and how do they rationalize their actions. To be able to understand why terrorist perform the actions that they do, there needs to be a basic understanding of what a terrorist is. Terrorism can be defined as the use of force against a civilian population to create fear and attempt to change the population's social or political positions. From there, there are a multitude of terrorist, such as those within large groups or those that the article focuses on, which are considered the “Lone Wolves”. Though they may work in small groups, these “lone wolves” are defined by their acting without the influence of a major terrorist group. The article explicitly states that “A key feature of this type of terrorism is its operational independence: the perpetrators are not directly linked to any extremist group, and the plot is conceived and directed by the individuals without any direct outside command or direction.” With this known, the article then gives two notable examples of lone wolf terrorist targeting sports events and attempts to discuss the rationale behind their attacks and draw connections between them.
The first being that the rationales for attacking the sporting events can be quite similar, even when conflicting ideologies are involved The second being that the reasons why terrorist target sports events is not just because they dislike the sport or have any grievances with it, rather they use the sport as a way to target the society involved with the event. By fitting the people partaking of these events as “the enemy” one could target and attack a society with relatively few morale