This article reassesses claims that the Incel movement constitutes a form of terrorism by examining its ideology, patterns of violence, and empirical case data. Drawing on an original dataset of US federal Incel-related cases from 2020–2023, alongside comparative analysis of prominent attacks, the study finds that Incel-linked violence lacks the strategic intent, coherent ideology, and communicative political purpose central to terrorism. Instead, such violence aligns more closely with grievance-driven, misogynistic hate crime and non-ideological mass killing frameworks. The findings caution against conceptual inflation and argue for preserving analytic distinctions between terrorism and other forms of extremist or idiosyncratic violence.
Meleagrou-Hitchens et al. (2026) studied this question.