In discussing terrorist violence, it is valuable to diagram the cycle of violent terrorist activity to understand at a deeper level what is going on.
The attached chart shows one way to view the phenomena of modern terrorism. On the top of the diagram are the three categories of the terror event itself: before during, and after. Either this is a cyclical relationship as one event feeds into another over time, or another terrorist for a different reason decides to execute an attack for a different reason on the same target.
On the left hand side are the categories of analysis for both parties, the terrorist in red and the terror target in blue. Here, the more specific categories of analysis are the goals of both parties and their specific actions in each phase.
In the goals for the parties, this chart shows nature of the parties intention and explains their action. For the terrorist, most of the activities occur in the before phase as they carefully plan and prepare for execution. During execution, often terrorists have feelings of regret or apprehension, leading up to a point of no return where they make the final decision to act. In the after phase, the terrorist wants to get the message out as well as remain safe. This is a dangerous position as they want as much exposure to their message as possible, but the more exposure they get, the more risk they assume in being identified and acted against.
For the target, the goal before is to prevent the attack from happening. This is extremely difficult because identification of the terrorist before the event is very difficult. Of course, the target can take proactive steps to go after the terrorist, but more often than not action must be defensive, such as having police officers that are more visible. During the attack and the immediate aftermath, the immediate need is for safety. In the days, weeks, and months following the attack is the need to cope and understand who was responsible, why they acted the way they did, and to determine just what should be done about it to prevent similar attacks in the future.
Throughout, it is easy to see the emotion that drives this cycle. For the terrorist, the emotional feelings begin with frustration, which leads to anger, then hesitancy, then aggression, and then rationalizing or possibly fear. For the terror target, there are the felt emotions of paranoia, fear, and anger.
Now that we have established an organized framework for analyzing the parts of a terrorist attack, in the next discussion we will discuss where interventions can be formulated to break the cycle of terrorist violence.