Project Overview

The GRIEVANCE Project is a five-year research programme at the Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London (UCL) funded by the European Research Council (ERC). 

GRIEVANCE seeks to make significant advances in increasing our understanding, and thereby reducing the risk, of extremist violence against non-combatants. The barbarity of such violent acts, coupled with the fact that participation in them is characterised by low base rates, has led researchers to seek out individual qualities of the offender with a particular focus upon what radicalisation is and how its drivers can be countered. 

This search has proven unproductive and impractical. In fact, it has most likely limited and unduly narrowed a wider consideration of the ways in which social scientists can bring what conceptual tools we have to bear on the problem of controlling and managing such behaviour. This project shifts the focus from individual qualities (what we think terrorists and other similar offenders “are”) to a consideration of the situational qualities of their behaviour – in other words, what violent offenders do and how they do it. This is consistent with developments in the area of crime control and crime science more generally.

GRIEVANCE characterises risk in terms of a process and dedicates a work package (WP) to each stage of the process.