Rueben Ananthan Santhana Dass
Rueben Ananthan Santhana Dass is a Research Analyst with ICPVTR, a constituent unit of RSIS, NTU, Singapore. His research interests include terrorism and counter-terrorism in Southeast Asia; trends and evolutions in suicide terrorism; Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) terrorism; and the use of technology and unconventional weapons by terrorist groups.
This paper nuances existing understandings of terrorists’ motivations by uncovering the emotional process of ressentiment in the manifestos of three far-right violent extremists. Through the application of Reinhard Wolf’s framework of discourse analysis, it finds that ressentiment plays a significant role in self-legitimating perpetrators’ attacks, though the resented group is different than expected. Surprisingly, the […]
While the Islamic State’s early years after its expansion from Iraq to Syria are generally considered a success, it was also during this period that internal ideological tensions developed within the group. The emerging faction of al-Hazimiyya, named after the Saudi cleric Ahmad al-Hazimi, instigated a power struggle within the group that posed a serious […]
This policy brief discusses the threat of maritime terrorism in the Tri-border area and the weaknesses of the Trilateral Cooperative Arrangement, a trilateral treaty between Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines that was set up to mitigate terrorism in the region. We also highlight the challenges associated with counter-terrorism in the region such as resource allocation […]