Evolving Narratives of Terrorism

This book advances a transdisciplinary framework for analysing terrorist organisations through their own narratives, with a focus on the evolution of the Italian Red Brigades. The work adapts four foundational questions about behaviour, drawn from the work of ethologist Niko Tinbergen to the group level, treating the Red Brigades as an evolving collective entity and their own texts as primary evidence. Drawing on a large Italian-language corpus – Communiqués, manifestos, prison writings, court rulings, and interviews with former members —the book introduces the vector of evolutionary change to identify the moments that permanently redirected the group’s trajectory, showing how early strategic choices locked the Red Brigades into patterns they could not escape and challenging the assumption that terrorist organisations can freely reinvent themselves. Designed to be broadly applicable, this framework can be used for both historical cases and ongoing assessments where narrative data are abundant online. By bringing evolutionary reasoning into dialogue with narrative analysis, the book offers new insights into how terrorist organisations develop, stabilise, ossify, and sometimes transform themselves. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, criminology, Italian politics and International Relations.