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To date, insufficient attention and analysis have been focused on the victims of terrorist attacks—whether the survivors themselves or family members, friends, or colleagues directly affected by this violence. This paper focuses on one important aspect of this area of terrorism studies: the organized groups of families and friends that have emerged since September 11, 2001, to become a powerful voice in U.S. counterterrorist policy and legislation. These groups were remarkably successful in pressuring the U.S. Congress to establish a commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks, getting the White House to approve it, and then ensuring that the commission’s most important recommendations were enacted into law.
Although their success is well known by now, the number and diversity of these groups, their wide disparity in mission and services, and their strategies for achieving their missions are not well understood. This paper addresses that need. We describe the victims’ groups that emerged from 9/11 and clarify their missions and strategies. We also compare the 9/11 victims’ groups to victims’ groups that were formed in response to previous terrorist attacks both in the United States and abroad, highlighting the lessons the 9/11 groups learned from these precedents and the differences between the 9/11 groups and those that preceded them.
The victims’ groups that emerged after the 9/11 attacks were unprecedented in their number and the diversity of their goals. Some focused on improving public policies to prevent further terrorist attacks; others focused on ensuring the creation of a proper memorial at Ground Zero; still others worked to establish September 11 as national day devoted to voluntary service. Given this diversity, membership in more than one group became common in the aftermath of the attacks, when these organizations appeared in rapid succession. Although logic might dictate that greater progress and benefit could be harnessed from a few broadly oriented, larger, and therefore potentially more powerful, organizations, this has not been true of the 9/11 groups that both proliferated and pursued deliberately narrower, respective agendas. We describe 16 of these groups in this paper.....
Complete 66 page paper at the link.