Terrorist Group Financing: lessons from 2022 and a look ahead at 2023

Welcome to the first Insight Intelligence issue of 2023! In this piece, I put on my thinking cap and look ahead to what we can expect for the year in terrorist group financing, building on my analysis of trends and methods from 2022. This is only available for subscribers, so if you haven’t joined the hundreds of paying subscribers, you know what to do.

I’m often asked “what’s new” in terrorist financing, and whether particular trends and issues are truly novel or noteworthy. My first cut at answering this question was my book Illicit Money: Financing Terrorism in the 21st Century, where I established some baselines for terrorist groups.

In 2022, I updated this analysis of terrorist groups (organizational financing) to include nine new groups; I also updated analysis on four others that had already been included in the data, but had evolved their financing methods. The dataset for organizational financing of terrorist groups now covers 71 different groups across the political spectrum. Most of the shifts in organizational financing that have occurred over the last three years are attributable to two main trends: the increase in ideologically-motivated violent extremism (particularly violent right-wing groups), and the spread of ISIS into new provinces.