This is the Guardian.

I'm Jason Burke. I'm an international correspondent at the Guardian.

I've been writing about violent extremism for 20, 25 years now.

And a while back, I decided that someone should have a good look at the myth of the lone wolf terrorist.

So one of the things that has always interested me about terrorism is that it is basically a social activity.

So if you look at the history of terrorism, there are very few violent extremists, whether they're

acting for religious reasons or political reasons or a mixture of both who do things entirely on their own.

So when at the end of the O.O.s, about seven or eight years, nine years after the 9-11 attacks of 2001,

analysts and journalists and specialists in the field started using this term lone wolf terrorism.

I was interested by it and I suspect it strongly that there was much more to the term than met the eye.

And also what it was describing, what were we in a period where you were seeing for the first time really,

significant amounts of individuals acting in a violent way to pursue an agenda.

Or was there something else going on?

And the answer was that yes, there was really, there was quite a lot of else going on.

So when I started looking at lone wolf terrorism, I found some really fascinating things,

which I really didn't suspect. So the term started to be used in the 80s by American right wing extremists.

Then got picked up by the academic and law enforcement communities and then spread more widely and

was particularly coming into use to cover up what I thought was one really obvious and important thing,

which is that even if they act alone, terrorists don't act in a vacuum.

They're part of something bigger than just themselves. And that struck me as fascinating.

It confirmed what I really thought all along about terrorism being a social activity.

And I wanted to look in greater detail at that and at why this term lone wolf terrorism was becoming so prevalent.

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