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This chapter puts an evolutionary lens on the motivating factors and potential solutions to the problem of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. It argues that Islamic fundamentalist terrorism must be studied through a consilient approach, incorporating ideas from the life as well as social sciences, to aid social scientists and policy analysts in identifying its causes and solutions. Understanding the motivations of terrorists is critical for creating efficient policies to stop them, ideally before they ever become terrorists. This approach also allows policymakers to understand why few Islamic fundamentalist terrorists defect and how policies may be created to promote defections. Finally, this chapter advances the goal of consilience, that is, using insights from human evolution and ecology, as well as from the social sciences, to create a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of human behavior.

This chapter presents several psychodynamic analyses concerning the root of Islamic terrorism, addressing specifically the dichotomy between the U.S. and Muslim countries. Many psychodynamic authors attribute religious terrorism to a fundamentalist “East” in contrast to a secular “West.” Jessica Benjamin traces Islamic violence to the lack of an Enlightenment period in the “Muslim world” compared with the U.S. Likewise, Maria Miliora also claims that Muslim nations are devoid of modernity, that the Muslim countries appear to be standing still during the past 200 years while the West has greatly progressed to modernity. Authors who strive not to condemn Muslims while analyzing terrorists' motives, still point to the dichotomy between the U.S. and Muslim countries as one of the causes of Islamic terrorism. Elisha Davar persuades his reader to avoid stereotyping Islam but insists that the difference between values of Americans and Muslims is significant in the study of terrorism.

This chapter looks at the racial politics of the right, asserting that the “real America” narrative forwarded by the McCain/Palin campaign was rooted in the racially coded populist discourse that the right has aggressively forwarded since the late 1970s. According to this discourse, the nation is endangered by cultural and demographic trends characteristic of the present age—non-white immigration, secular liberalism, gay rights, feminism, “black racism,” political correctness, and Islamic terrorism. Obama was viewed as the embodiment of these threats, a foreign other who stood in opposition to the interests of “everyday Americans” and the nation itself. The chapter illustrates how a vote for the Republican ticket is supposedly a vote to uphold the sanctity and security of conservative, white, Christian America.

This chapter examines security laws, including loyalty oaths, enforced in the wake of the English Revolution, and designed to preserve the new regime from disloyal elements, especially those known as papists. It shows that reading these strictures through the lens of an earlier “equation of Protestantism and loyalty, Catholicism and disloyalty” does not do justice to the way they were now used. This change was due in part to the newly visible phenomenon of disloyal Anglicans, and resulted in the development of new religious tests, such as the Declaration against Transubstantiation, which were aimed only at suspected Catholics. It argues that the equation of Catholicism with political disloyalty was counterfactual, but politically useful to Anglicans. A similar conflation of religious with political identity can be observed today, with the threat of Islamic terrorism.

Competition over natural resources has figured prominently among explanations of armed conflicts, from Malthusian fears of population growth and land scarcity to national security interests over resources defined as “strategic” because of their industrial or military use, such as oil and uranium. Access to natural resources and the transformation of nature into tradable commodities are deeply political processes, in which military force can play a role of domination or resistance. Armed separatism within Indonesia and Nigeria, annexation attempts on Kuwait and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, protracted civil wars in Angola and the Philippines, and coups d’état in Iran and Venezuela have all incorporated important resource dimensions. Arguably, the radical Islamic terrorism that has affected the United States since the early 1990s is to some extent an oil-related “blowback”: U.S. military deployment in Saudi Arabia, criticisms against the corruption of the Gulf regimes, and ironically, part of the funding made available to terrorist groups. This chapter examines relations between resources and armed conflicts, with a focus on commodities legally traded on international markets (thereby excluding drugs, as well as water and land involved, for example, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) and on extracted resources such as oil, minerals, and timber, in particular. Beyond a simple reading of so-called resource wars as violent modes of competitive behavior, this chapter argues that resource exploitation and the resource dependence of many producing countries play a role in shaping incentives and opportunities of uneven development, misgovernance, coercive rule, insurrection, and foreign interference. This relationship, however, is not systematic: history, political culture, institutions, and regional neighborhoods, as well as a country’s place in the international economy, all play a part these relations. The incorporation of resources into an armed conflict has also specific implications upon its course through their influence on the motivations, strategies, and capabilities of belligerents. Military targets often consist of commercial business opportunities rather than political targets, while the cost of engaging adversaries may be calculated in terms of financial reward.