Bit of a departure from usual activity, this is an animated interpretation for the website The Conversation of some of the lone actor work that I have been involved in. The numbers and detail of the work comes from the Countering Lone Actor Terrorism (CLAT) project that involved a range of excellent research institutions and colleagues (who are captured in one of the images). A HUGE thanks and applause is due to Wes Mountain who did the animation and was immensely patient with me in producing it.
This aside, spoke to Sky News for a special about a terror case in Manchester with links to the Manchester bomber, and the broader question of the terrorist threat to the UK linked to Libya, and for Canada’s Perspectives with Alison Smith on CPAC about what to do about returning foreign terrorist fighters.
Comic explainer: what is lone-actor terrorism?
Security services and governments around the world remain vigilant to the threat of lone-actor terrorists in our cities.
But when there’s often no indication of an explicit intention or ideology, questions about mental health and with groups like Islamic State willing to encourage and claim responsibility for almost any attack, how do we define lone-actor terrorism?
In this comic explainer, Raffaello Pantucci, Associate Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Director of International Security Studies at RUSI, explains the theory behind lone-actor terrorism and what we know about lone actors’ effectiveness, motives and behaviours that could help us to better understand and disrupt future attacks.
Rachid Kassim is quoted from an interview with Jihadology.
Junaid Hussain’s quote is from court documents.
The full Countering Lone-Actor Terrorism Series is available at the Royal United Services Institute’s website.
Illustrations by Wes Mountain for The Conversation.
Raffaello Pantucci 
[…] “Assessment of the Lone Wolf Terrorist Concept” (Divergent Options) – “Comic explainer: what is lone-actor terrorism?” […]
[…] of my comments from last week on the topic of Belt and Road. Et enfin, pour les lecteurs français, la bande dessinée que j’ai réalisée avec Wes a été traduite en français. Vous pouvez le trouver ici. […]
[…] Beyond this op-edding in the SCMP, have also been delinquent in updating media commentary. Since this was last done, I spoke to the Telegraph about a Pakistani Taliban video, the Independent about the fact that Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s son was killed fighting in Syria, to the Telegraph again about the worrying set of arrests in Germany that included someone who had managed to make Ricin, to Huffington Post about the fact that al Shabaab issued an edict about banning plastic bags, and to the Independent again about ISIS telling its followers to beware of fake social media accounts. Beyond this, The Conversation posted a podcast which included a longer conversation I had had with them about lone actor terrorism as part of the preparation for making this comic strip about the phenomenon. […]