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UK government counter‐terrorism policy in the wake of the London bombings of 7 July 2005 has included an evolving set of measures seeking to engage the support of and productive interaction with UK citizens, so as to help oppose violent extremist ideology, to thwart potential sympathy for its proponents and to avert future incidents. The primary focus of such attempts has been Al‐Qaida‐influenced violent extremism. Government preventative measures have provoked controversy, especially in British Muslim communities. The article examines their reaction, from research commissioned by the Metropolitan Police Service and undertaken in London by the International School for Communities, Rights and Inclusion (ISCRI) from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), in its community engagement (CE) Pathfinder programme. The findings from this research find many parallels in recent academic literature and other commentaries. The authors contend that some government programmes have erroneously served to stigmatise UK Muslim communities ‘en masse’, which has been counter‐productive to the government objective of gaining community support and involvement, and has thereby compromised the effectiveness of counterterrorism preventative measures. The article highlights a different emphasis and some specific elements for a revised prevention policy in counter terrorism from consideration of these sources, including the primary evidence from Muslim communities themselves in the community engagement Pathfinder programme.

This chapter looks at a new form of a hybrid perpetrator within the field of individualized political violence. We reveal, that the new thing about (transnational) terrorism overcomes current oppositions and contradictions regarding terrorists and persons running amok, which (strategically) leads to an individualization of terrorism and thereby to a hybridization of a terroristic warfare.

By outlining organizational and structural changes in terroristic strategy within the framework of using both modern and antimodern elements, economic thinking, acting global as well as local, and by using network structures, the individualization of terror to the point of hybrid perpetrators is presented.

The new thing about (transnational) terrorism is the evolution of individualized perpetrators, radicalizing themselves without a clear connection to terroristic organizations. This leads to a hybridization of terroristic warfare, and within individualized single perpetrators it can be described as terrok. A terrorist running amok or a gunman on rampage with a radicalized mindset, equipped with his very individual ideology, who carries out his attacks logistically and operatively on his own while accepting his own death constitutes a new strategic way of irritating western society.

Currently, terrorists and persons running amok are separated into sharply distinguished categories. But regarding new tendencies in terroristic attacks committed by single perpetrators, this separation seems to be no longer able to capture the individualization of terrorism and thereby the linked hybridization of a terroristic warfare adequately. But in combining findings from both approaches, the new concept of terrok is able to do so.