Affiliation Instead of Loneness: Rethinking the “Lone Wolf” Typology

Since the early 1990s, policy-makers, scholars, and practitioners have voiced increasing concern about the rise of lone actor terrorists. In 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security assessed that lone actors posed the most lethal domestic violent extremist threat and would continue to pose a significant challenge for law enforcement because of their ability to radicalize independently and attain weapons easily. Research supports the intelligence community’s assessment that lone actors are the deadliest terrorist threat in the United States. The literature highlights that these actors are harder to catch than terrorists who are part of a group because lone individuals have a limited footprint.