The Infrastructure of Terrorism: Concept and Essence

Systemic approach views terrorism as a complex system, as violent criminal activities determined by the factors of external environment and carried out under their direct influence. The specifics of terrorism lie in the fact that these factors are mainly «man-made» and purposeful: they include actions of financing terrorism, recruiting new members into terrorist groups, their training and ideological «conditioning», providing arms and technical means, as well as information support. Within the framework of systemic approach, the essence of these actions could be described by the concept «the infrastructure of terrorism». The author suggests that the infrastructure of terrorism should be understood as purposeful socially dangerous actions aimed at the formation and development of an ideological basis, human resources reserves, organizational-management structures, material-technical and information bases of terrorism. The author proves that the concept of infrastructure has a considerable gnoseological potential and could be productively used to research the phenomenon of terrorism. Specifically, it allows to stress that terrorism, as a complex systemic object, cannot exist without its ideological, human resources, informational, material-technical, organizational-management infrastructure; to show a close functional connection between terrorism and its infrastructure; to demonstrate objective differences between non-violent socially dangerous actions constituting the ideological, human resources, informational, resource bases of terrorism, and terrorism proper; to deepen the understanding of the causal complex of terrorism, to differentiate between the political and socio-economic factors contributing to radicalization and the spread of terrorism, and the purposeful actions determining terrorist activities; to create a foundation for the classification and systematization of terrorism-related crimes.