How does the terrorist group Al-Qaeda select their targets and what is their motivation?

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict Studies, Security, grade: 12.0, Aalborg University (Culture and Global Studies), language: English, abstract: The paper sets out to show the link between the attacked targets and motivations of Al-Qaeda (AQ) as a terrorist group. It introduces AQ and outlines its goal of establishing an Islamic Caliphate and the immediate objective of driving out the United States Interest from the Muslim world. It proceeds to provide data on the attacked targets claimed by AQ.

The data is analyzed using the Constructivist theory to expose the development of identities and how they relate to the immediate objective and the attacked targets. It proceeds to discuss the cases where AQ claimed responsibility by looking at the messages in relation to the motivation and the attacked target. Further, it looks at cases where AQ was suspected but did not formally claim responsibility to establish the consistency between the AQ¿s goal and attacked target understood within the constructed identity.

The paper finally concludes that attacked targets are very consistent with AQ¿s motivations hence the ability to use the combination to identify a terrorist group responsible for an attack where both are known and no single group claims responsibility.