Can "dangerous speech" be used to explain "lone-wolf" terrorism? /

This has brought increased academic and policy focus on lone wolf terrorism, to the point where the American president has spoken of lone wolves as a primary security concern faced by the United States.3 Indeed, the lone wolf paradigm has emerged as Al-Qaeda’s primary strategy for attacking the West since the degradation of the centralized transnational network originally built by Osama Bin Laden. [...] Within the second section of this paper, the applicability of dangerous speech to lone wolf terrorism will be tested through the examination of case studies. [...] The examples used are from Western Europe, as most of the data available on this phenomenon is drawn from acts committed in that region and North America.8 The third section of the paper concludes with the findings of the test regarding the applica- bility of dangerous speech toward understanding lone wolf terrorism. [...] Different thinkers emphasize different aspects of the term, such as how “lone” the perpetrator must be to qualify for the label, the presence or absence of political ideology behind their actions, or the intent and scale of the violence carried out. [...] This is commonly attributed to the decline of transnational terror networks like Al-Qae- da and a shift in their tactics toward inspiring attacks by like-minded individuals, which is one of the reasons behind the previously described concerns of authorities and scholars regarding this particular form of terrorism.21 Many of the lone wolf attacks mentioned in this paper would have been unthinkable