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The purpose of this paper is to use an environmental criminology and situational crime prevention (SCP) framework to study global assassinations carried out by terrorists. The authors set forth a series of hypotheses to explain successful and unsuccessful assassination incidents.

The authors use assassination data from the Global Terrorism Database from 1970 to 2014 to estimate a series binary logistic regression models.

Results indicate that various situational factors contribute to successful assassinations, such as target types, weapon types, total fatalities, and injuries.

These findings suggest that environmental criminology and SCP are valuable in developing prevention measures that thwart and disrupt attempted assassinations by terrorists.

Criminology has yet to apply environmental criminology and SCP to assassinations, a tactic often used by terrorists. This paper thus extends the existing assassination, terrorism, and criminology literature by applying this framework to assassinations performed by terrorists.

Purpose – This study demonstrates that serious episodes of presidential ill health can have positive impacts on role performance.

Design/methodology – The author utilizes both primary source materials (personal interviews with White House physicians and several other physicians who treated Reagan at the hospital, and the writings of key Reagan aides and family members) and secondary source materials (writings of political scientists, historians, and journalists).

Findings – Reagan was at first in critical condition. It was then that his Secretary of State appeared to make a bold grab for power, an act that contributed materially to the end of his political career. Additionally, the administration’s failure to invoke the presidential disability amendment allowed the official chain of command to be in doubt. Finally, the significant increase in Reagan’s popularity that flowed from his light-hearted demeanor after he was shot is examined here in terms of the President’s subsequent legislative successes.

Originality/value – This study suggests strongly that Reagan’s impressive legislative achievements in mid-1981 were due significantly to his heroic response to having been shot.

Looks at the reasons for the collapse of both regimes and considers the importance of repression with these developments. Contrasts the methods of Imperial Russia with the Bolsheviks looking at Court proceedings, prison conditions, education and propaganda in prison, exile and the secret police. Concludes that whilst social support is usually seen as essential for survival of a system, repression is not regarded as a positive element but can become the method for a system’s survival and stability.

The purpose of the paper is to explore socio-cultural-historical influences on the ideas of Soviet educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky, since these have become transferable to the point where their influence is now virtually global. The paper provides biographical sketches of Vygotsky, his father and his tutor interwoven with a history of terrorist movements.

Literary study, historical study, biographical study, speculative history.

Passages from his initial major work, Educational Psychology, reveal the radicalism of Lev Vygotsky's thought. It is suggested that two teacher-mentors, his father and a tutor, were influenced by the radical and terrorist narodnik, or populist, movements in Russia of the mid- to late-19th century and passed on this orientation to Vygotsky. The coincidences uncovered raise a series of questions about the degree to which these socio-cultural-historical circumstances influenced Vygotsky's fundamental research project and his attempt to develop an educational method that insisted on going beyond bounds.

Several unresolved questions for debate are raised at the end of the paper that may be of particular interest to those using Vygotsky in teacher education programmes.

Connects Lev Vygotsky's socio-cultural-historical circumstances to his research project, couched in terms of boundary-crossing and knowledge transference.

In this chapter I argue that intimate massacre and home-grown jihadi terrorism can be explained similarly through the concept of the Doomed Antihero. In both forms of public mass killing the perpetrator has subjectively experienced a long period of humiliation; he has slowly converted humiliation into rage; he has adopted an antiheroic style from a culturally available catalog to channel his rage; he has identified a symbol of his humiliation for attack; he has become determined to permanently destroy the symbol by killing people inhabiting it; and he sees “his” attack as a final act that will erase his past and reify his future.