In a long and somewhat discouraging article on the roots of terrorism, Peter Byrne in NewScientist (19 August 2017) notes a problem local to my town, that of young immigrants becoming radicalized, and an approach with some success:
The key to combating extremism lies in addressing its social roots, and intervening early, before anyone becomes a “devoted actor” willing to lay down their lives for a cause, says Scott Atran at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Resolution of Intractable Conflicts (see “Devoted to the cause“). “Until then, there are all sorts of things you can do.” One of the most effective counter measures, he says, is community engagement. High-school football and the scouts movement have been effective responses to antisocial behaviour among the disenfranchised children of US immigrants, for example.
Another promising avenue is to break down stereotypes, says social psychologist Susan Fiske at Princeton University. These are not necessarily religious or racial stereotypes, but generalised stereotypes we all hold about people around us. When we categorise one another, we are particularly concerned with social status and competition, viewing people of low status as incompetent, and competitors as untrustworthy. Throughout history, violent acts and genocides have tended to be perpetrated against high-status individuals with whom we compete for resources, and who therefore elicit our envy, says Fiske.
One problem, of course, is xenophobia in the American community. How much hostility is an immigrant expected to endure before she or he loses hope and begins to search for a new avenue of activity which will lead to, well, success? Not success as we might normally define it, but success in some sense that is satisfactory to that immigrant – gaining training in weapons in order to be accepted as a jihadist, as happened with some young Somalis here in Minnesota. Several were stopped as they were leaving the country, and convicted of various crimes. One made it out and was reported killed in fighting somewhere.
For all that America is made up of immigrants, we hardly have a spotless record of welcoming immigrants, so it’s a little hard to think of communities organizing to find ways to welcome immigrants as a matter of course; the efforts that are made seem more extraordinary than that. The individualism that runs rampant in the United States also militates against such efforts; that same individualism may also be alien to some immigrants. It all makes for a heck of a challenge, and then add in the instant communications of the Internet, and what may have taken weeks or months 100 years ago now takes a few minutes – such as collecting information on what people with similar problems are doing.
This sounds like a long challenge, and little progress will be made while the Trump Administration is in charge. Even the Obama Administration may have made things worse through their decapitation strategy:
[Hriar] Cabayan runs the Pentagon’s Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) programme. His counter-terrorism unit taps the expertise of a volunteer pool of 300 scientists from academia, industry, intelligence agencies and military universities. They convene virtually and physically to answer classified and unclassified questions from combatants, including special operations forces fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The result is a steady stream of white papers largely concluding that the US counter-terrorism strategy – decapitating insurgency leadership, bombing terrorist strongholds – is counter-productive. …
Drone strikes aimed at decapitating terrorist cells are likely to fail too. A 2017 study by Jennifer Varriale Carson at the University of Central Missouri concluded that killing high-profile jihadists is “counter-productive, if its main intention is a decrease in terrorism perpetrated by the global jihadist movement”. In July 2016, The Georgetown Public Policy Review reported a “statistically significant rise in the number of terrorist attacks [in Pakistan] occurring after the US drone program begins targeting a given province“.
This suggests we’ve mistaken the symptoms for the causes. A high profile leader, even a cell itself, may not be a cause of radicalization, but a symptom of a deeper issue, and the “solution” functions more as an irritant, radicalizing more people who see our solution as an injustice visited upon them.
The deeper issues are way beyond my minor skills; heck, what little I’ve written is just some babble by a bemused software engineer. But these issues have the capacity to affect all of us, and therefore deserve a little thought from all of us.
