The Structural 'Root' Causes of Non-Suicide Terrorism: A Systematic Scoping Review

This article proposes a systematic scoping review of the structural “root” causes of non-suicide terrorism. It aims to synthesize the knowledge produced on this very specific issue from 2000 and 2009 and to raise questions about unanswered issues and those that deserve more in-depth investigation. After presenting our methodology, we offer an overview of this subfield of research. We then discuss our main results and explain why no substantive argument on the structural “root” causes of terrorism emerges. We argue that the main gaps lie in the high fragmentation of this subfield, definitional problems, a somehow flexible operationalization of concepts, and a high dependence on sources of questionable reliability.