In Pursuit of the Lone Wolf Terrorist: Investigative Economics & New Horizons for the Economic Analysis of Terrorism

This book explores new horizons for the economic analysis of terrorism with an innovative combination of economics and offender profiling. The book is aimed at contributing to law enforcement efforts to pre-empt and pursue the lone wolf terrorist. By taking the economic analysis of terrorism back to its core concepts of opportunities’ and choices’ and by insisting that all results be both computable and relevant to the investigative process, the author examines lone wolf terrorism from a unique perspective that yields new insights into the nature of the lone wolf terrorist’s opportunities and choices to inflict human tragedy. Not content with the task of delineating opportunities and choices, the author shows how the frameworks he has developed may be inverted and deployed in the pursuit of the lone wolf terrorist if efforts to pre-empt the lone wolf terrorist have failed. This book is groundbreaking for both the type of economics analysis it presents and its conscious break with several long-held traditions of terrorism studies. Both academics and law enforcement practitioners will find the author’s analysis stimulating, confronting and, above all, applicable to the investigative processes designed to pre-empt or pursue a single violent offender who aims to etch a graphic biography of violence into the public consciousness.