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<p>While scholars study the radicalization process that produces lone-wolf terrorists in America, news stories regularly report on Muslim Americans leaving their local communities to join terrorist organizations. Currently, radicalizing individuals to act as lone wolves is the most successful method of Islamist attack on the American homeland. A novel approach to analyzing radicalization is employment of the prisoner’s dilemma, which examines the motivations behind individual decision-making. The prisoner’s dilemma is used by game theorists and international-relations scholars to demonstrate how persons who might ordinarily be expected to cooperate may actually work against each other and defect from previous agreements or understandings. Because lone-wolf attacks will likely continue to pose the most frequent threat to the U.S. homeland, it is imperative to learn how potential homegrown terrorists can be encouraged to identify with their local communities rather than defect from the social bonds of church, school, neighborhood, and workplace. This thesis explores how the prisoner’s dilemma may reveal ways to discourage radicalism in at-risk Muslim Americans.
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<br>Subjects: Lone-wolf; terrorist; terrorism; lone offender; radicalization; de-radicalization; counter-radicalization; international relations; IR theory; game theory; prisoner’s dilemma; Nidal Hasan; Fort Hood; Mohamed Mohamud; Portland Car Bomb; Maajid Nawaz; radical; Islamism; islamophobia; mutual cooperation; mutual defection; sucker’s pay-off</div>
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Cedros, Christopher R.</div>
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