Criminology and the study of terrorism: lessons from Israel CSTPV Seminar

Gali Perry is a lecturer at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University in 2016 and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include the policing of political extremism, political violence and terrorism, and combine quantitative and qualitative research designs. She investigated police-public relations in the context of protest policing, paramilitary policing, airport security screening and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. In terrorism, she studied lone-actor vehicle-borne terrorist attacks, suspect communities' attitudes towards the police, and normative youths' developmental pathways into violent and non-violent extremism. She has won several distinguished awards, including the 2017 Golda Meir fellowship for early-career scholar, the 2019 Ellis and Alma Birk Prize in Law and the 2022 Israeli Society of Criminology Young Scholar's Award.
In the last few decades, criminological theories have become a useful tool in the study of terrorism, violent radicalization and political violence. Theoretical concepts such as crime hot-spots, situational crime prevention and recidivism were adapted to terrorism research, changing not only the way we study terrorism, but also criminology as an evolving discipline. While these frameworks were originally designed to study more “traditional” forms of crime, they offer perceptions and frameworks which may overcome some of the challenges embedded in terrorism research. In this seminar, we will discuss some of the criminological theories applied to the study of terrorism, and demonstrate their applications using findings from terrorism research in Israel. Specifically, we will review studies on situational crime prevention and lone-actor vehicle-borne terrorism; on police legitimacy and its potential contribution to aviation security; and on the criminology of place and terrorist target selection.