TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.
Friday, September 22, 2017
Anatomy of terror: What makes normal people become extremists?
This is not a difficult question. You start with boredom and perhaps social isolation. Then you self brainwash yourself to the point in which you finally drink the Koolaid.
The cure is even simpler. A low guilt threshold for the application of Summary Castration. This makes reading Jihadi propaganda deeply unpopular and stops self brainwashing.
Put all that in place and it is no trick to make it all go away.
None of this ever had anything to do with religion at all, except to provide useful idiots. The inclination has been a fringe phenomena for centuries and includes neo Nazis, anarchists and communists as well..
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Anatomy of terror: What makes normal people become extremists?
It takes more than religious fanaticism or
hatred to make someone take innocent lives, but recognise the true roots
of ISIS-inspired terror and they can be addressed
By Peter Byrne
VERA
MIRONOVA rides Humvee shotgun through Mosul’s shattered cityscape. It
is late January 2017. Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi has just
declared east Mosul liberated from three years of rule by Islamic State,
or ISIS. Most jihadist fighters are dead or captured, or have crossed
the Tigris to the west, digging in for a final stand. Left behind,
biding their time, are snipers and suicide bombers.
Much of the population has fled to refugee camps on the outskirts.
Those who stayed look lost and dazed. Men pull corpses out of houses
destroyed by air strikes. Others cobble together street-corner markets,
selling meat and vegetables imported from Erbil, 80 kilometres and
another world away.
Few women are visible. Mironova stands out, dressed in combat
trousers and a Harvard sweatshirt, wisps of blonde hair escaping her
blue stocking hat. Despite travelling in an armoured car, she’s clearly
not a combatant. She’s a social scientist, and her job is not to fight,
but to listen, learn and record.
We stop for breakfast at My Fair Lady, a ramshackle restaurant that
was a favoured eatery of ISIS fighters. The Iraqi special forces
soldiers accompanying us say it has the best pacha in town – steaming
bowls of sheep brains and intestines stuffed with rice, with slices of
black, fatty tongue and boiled oranges. Mironova orders a pizza.
A week later, a suicide bomber detonates himself at the entrance to
the packed restaurant, killing the owner and several customers.
“The United States does not have a real counter-terrorism strategy,” says Martha Crenshaw.
Faced with continued waves of jihadist terror attacks, in the conflict
zones of Syria and Iraq but also closer to home, the West seems at a
loss to know what to do. Crenshaw is something like the doyenne of
terrorism studies, with a half-century career studying the roots of
terror behind her. She occupies an office at Stanford University just
down the hall from Condoleezza Rice, the former US national security
advisor who was an architect of the “global war on terror” declared
after the attacks of 11 September 2001. “There is a vast amount of money
being thrown into the counter-terrorism system and nobody is in
charge,” Crenshaw says. “We do not even know what success might look
like. We are playing a dangerous game of whack-a-mole: terrorists pop
up. We try to beat them down, hoping they will give up.”
In July, al-Abadi was back in Mosul, this time to declare the final
liberation of Iraq’s second city. Near-saturation bombardment of the
centre by the US Air Force and a casualty-heavy, house-by-house
offensive led by Iraqi forces had eliminated most of the fighters
holding the city where the leader of ISIS, Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi, had
proclaimed its caliphate in 2014. The liberation came at a huge price.
Mosul lies in ruins, and tens of thousands of civilians are dead or
wounded. Almost one million residents have been displaced from their
homes.
The price has been paid not just in Mosul. In June, 206 civilians
were killed in bombings and other attacks carried out or inspired by
ISIS in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, Iran, Australia, Pakistan and
the UK, where radicalised ISIS supporters murdered eight in an attack
near London Bridge on 3 June. A couple of weeks earlier, on 22 May, a
22-year-old British Muslim named Salman Ramadan Abedi detonated an
improvised bomb laden with nuts and bolts at the entrance to the
Manchester Arena, killing himself and 22 others, many of them children.
Why? Religious fanaticism? Groundless hate? Perverted ideology?
Victory in the war on terror requires us to know what and who exactly we
are fighting.
After breakfast, we accompany Iraqi commandos into abandoned houses
that had been used by ISIS, wary of booby traps. We stare into darkened,
steel-barred rooms used as jails for sex slaves and “kafirs”, Muslims
who fell afoul of ISIS. We inspect the labels on tin cans, torn cookie
packaging and empty bottles of Scotch whisky.
The soldiers scoop up photographs, checkpoint passes and slips of
paper with names and phone numbers. Mironova bags religious tracts
written in Arabic and Russian. Many of ISIS’s foreign fighters in Iraq
and Syria are Chechnyans and Tajiks. Someone hands Mironova a diary
written in Russian. She reads out loud, translating a letter written by a
woman to her jihadist lover.
“We are made only for each other, our marriage is sealed in heaven,
we are together in this life and the afterlife, God willing. When you
left, I counted the days until I got you back, my beloved. Now you are
going to the war again; you may be gone forever. I will count the days
until we meet again, my beloved Zachary.” Following the letter, the
woman had penned a recipe for a honey cake that requires a creamy milk
not obtainable in Iraq. Jihadists dream of comfort food, too.
In his 2004 book Understanding Terror Networks,
Sageman examined the motivations of 172 jihadist terrorists as revealed
primarily in court documents. His conclusions fitted with decades of
jail interviews and psychological studies showing that terrorism is
neither solely reducible to ideological or religious motivations, nor to
personality disorders. “Terrorism is not a personality trait,” says
Sageman. “There is no such thing as a ‘terrorist’, independent of a
person who commits an act of terror.”
That presents a problem for efforts to profile, identify and
interdict individuals at risk of turning to terrorism, a central plank
of anti-radicalisation programmes such as the UK’s “Prevent” strategy
(see “Nip it in the bud“).
Democratic societies cannot keep an eye on everyone, and what they are
looking for may not even give any obvious sign of its existence.
Crenshaw’s influential paper “The causes of terrorism”,
published in 1981, summed up decades of observations of terrorists and
their organisations, ranging from 19th century Russian anarchists to
Irish, Israeli, Basque and Algerian nationalists. The outstanding common
characteristic of individual terrorists, she concluded, is their
normality. In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, political theorist Hannah Arendt noted the same thing about the “banal” Nazi concentration camp bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann.
The unremarkable Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann embodied the “banality of evil”
People who commit terrorist acts are usually embedded in a network of
familial and friendship ties with allegiance to a closed group, be that
tribal, cultural, national, religious or political. Historically, the
conditions for the murder of innocents by terrorism or genocide have
occurred when one group fears extinction by another group. Ordinary
people are motivated to “kill people by category” through their own
group identity.
Viewed from inside the group, that can seem rational: terrorists are
brave altruists protecting the group from harm by powerful outsiders.
Terrorist acts are warnings to the out-group, demanding that certain
actions be taken, such as withdrawing a military occupation or ending
human and civil rights abuses. Terrorism is a militarised public
relations ploy to advance a grander scheme – a political tactic, not a
profession or an overarching ideology.
But the vast majority of people who might share the same sense of
grievance or political goals are not motivated to kill and maim the
innocent. Criminologist Andrew Silke
at the University of East London has conducted many interviews with
imprisoned jihadists in the UK. “When I ask them why they got involved,
the initial answer is ideology,” he says. “But if I talk to them about
how they got involved, I find out about family fractures, what was
happening at school and in their personal lives, employment
discrimination, yearnings for revenge for the death toll of Muslims.”
Yet this is not a popular view with counter-terrorism agencies, he
says. “The government does not like to hear that someone became a
jihadist because his brothers were beaten up by police or air strikes
blew up a bunch of civilians in Mosul. The dominant idea is that if we
concentrate on, somehow, defeating the radical Islamicist ideology, we
can leave all of the messy, complicated behavioural stuff alone.”
Mironova trained as a mathematician, game theorist and behavioural economist. A fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School,
she is one of few researchers to venture directly into combat zones to
examine the roots of jihadist terror. Her work has been funded variously
by the US National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses
to Terrorism (START), George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the
United Nations and the World Bank.
During extended stays in Syria, Iraq and Yemen over the past five
years, Mironova has built up trust networks in a politically diverse
spectrum of insurgents, including “radical” and “moderate” jihadists and
ISIS members and defectors. She moves easily through the clogged
frontline check points surrounding Mosul with the permission of the
Iraqi military. She stays close to her protectors, careful not to cross
the ethical line of “doing no harm” that separates academic research
from intelligence gathering.
“We are playing a dangerous game of whack-a-mole with the terrorists”
By seeing things through the eyes of the fighters, Mironova aims to
model what drives them, and how their individual motivations affect
group behaviours and vice versa. She reads Arabic, but employs local
translators in the field. She interviews fighters and civilians in
hospitals, refugee camps and on the front lines face to face and via
telephone or Skype.
Iraq as a whole is mainly Shia, but Mosul is largely Sunni; ISIS
practices an apocalyptic form of the Sunni faith in a region wracked by
social and economic catastrophe. Many civilians in the areas under their
control collaborate, willingly and unwillingly, with ISIS. Some share
their houses with fighters. Some work in ISIS factories, building
homemade rockets, cutting and welding steel for jail bars and armour
plates for tanks. Some escape into refugee camps. Some marry fighters.
Some join sleeper cells.
In “The causes of terrorism”, Crenshaw observed that it is often the
children of social elites who first turn to terrorism, hoping to inspire
the less-privileged masses to approve a radical change in the social
order. Many Jihadist organisations are led by upper middle class
intellectuals, often engineers. Al Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is a
medical doctor; Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi reportedly has a doctorate in
Islamic studies.
But the work of Mironova and others shows that the local ISIS rank
and file is more down-to-earth: disenfranchised people struggling to eke
out a living for their families in war zones. Foreign fighters tend to be more ideologically driven, and most motivated by factors beyond group identity to make the ultimate sacrifice (see “Devoted to the cause“).
Militants may be motivated by revenge or the promise of heavenly rewards – but some just treat jihad as a job
Some militants seek to avenge the deaths of friends and relatives
from US drone attacks, Shia militias, Iraqi police or US and British
special operations forces. But as the sex slaves and Scotch suggest,
jihadist fighters do not focus exclusively on heavenly rewards, or even
hatred or revenge. Not everyone wants to die. Jihadist brigades in Iraq
seize oil and vehicles, which they transport to high demand markets in
Syria seeking to maximise profits. They often distribute gains from
their looting and business operations communally.
Many of their adherents are purely economic actors, recruited with
offers of competitive salaries, health insurance and benefits paid to
their families should they be killed in battle. Mironova surveyed a
cohort of Iraqi women who had encouraged their husbands and sons to join
ISIS in order to get better family living quarters. Some recruits just
need a job.
In Iraq and Syria, there are more than 1000 radical Islamist,
moderate Islamist, and non-sectarian brigades seeking to recruit
militants to their brand of insurgency. In Mironova’s models, their
behaviour is determined by resource constraints, much as capitalist
enterprises thrive and die. Groups compete to attract the best fighters.
Those with low budgets may choose a radical religious line to attract
foreign fanatics who are not as professional as fighters motivated by
money, but will work for just room and board. Such models suggest that
although the roots of violent jihadism might be expressed as religious
fervour, they are anchored in more mundane, utilitarian – and perhaps
solvable – causes.
“When the politicians demonise ISIS as evil, hormones flood the brain
with danger signals,” says Hriar Cabayan. “We forget how to think
scientifically. We need to get inside the heads of ISIS fighters and
look at ourselves as they look at us.”
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.
Reliable information on terrorist attacks and the effectiveness of counter-terrorist actions is hard to find. START’s Global Terrorism Database,
based at the University of Maryland, records details of terrorist
incidents as reported by English-language media. It does not record
counter-terrorist actions. Crunching event-based data from START’s media
sources can reveal statistical patterns in terrorist attacks, including
how frequently certain groups attack, numbers of fatalities and types
of targets and weapons involved. The Mapping Militant Organizations database,
hosted at Stanford University, includes data relevant to the political
environments that nurture terrorism, but also relies on English-only
news reports and selected academic journals.
Neither database includes acts of terror committed by states, except
for Islamic State. The definitional boundaries between insurgency and
terrorism and state repression are vague. Militant actions directed
against soldiers can be recorded as terrorism, while lethal police
actions or government-initiated attacks on civilians are regarded as
acts of war, or collateral damage, and so ignored.
Classified data is no more comprehensive: about 80 per cent of
top-secret intelligence is drawn from open sources, including media
reports. Raw data that contradicts policy or that tarnishes the military
is often under-reported or ignored by field officers who are more
concerned with living to fight another day. There is censorship, too: a
recent investigation by Military Times reports that since 9/11, the Pentagon has failed to publicly report about a third of its air strikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, omitting an estimated 6000 strikes since 2014.
Relying on such imperfect sources can obscure the real motivations
and root causes behind events. “The problem is that the press usually
has a completely wrong narrative about the perpetrators that is only
corrected in the evidence presented at the trials,” says Sageman.
National Security Agency files leaked by Edward Snowden reveal that the
NSA has trouble hiring Arabic and Pashtu speaking intelligence analysts
who understand the cultures they monitor. Military intelligence agencies
focus more on locating and killing terrorist suspects than on
understanding sociological motivations.
Cabayan praises Mironova’s “brave” style of research, and the data
from the ground that it brings. At the SMA meeting in March this year,
the question was whether the physical defeat of ISIS in Mosul would
eliminate the threat. Sixty scientists, including Mironova, examined the
problem from a variety of perspectives. Their unequivocal answer was no. Events so far bear out that prediction.
There is no easy solution to the problem of terrorism, says Cabayan,
because neither terrorists nor counter-terrorists are entirely rational
operators. “The words ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ make no sense,” he
says. “People behave emotionally, illogically. Human societies are
complex, adaptive systems with unpredictable, emergent properties.”
Many strands of evidence now suggest that terrorist and
counter-terrorist systems are a single system governed by feedback
loops; the actions and tactics of one side continually evolve in
response to the actions of the other, as in a wrestling match. From this
perspective, ISIS’s trajectory can be calculated only retrospectively,
in response to events.
It is an agile trajectory. Statistical models built around what is
known of the frequency and casualty counts of insurgent and terrorist
incidents in Syria and Iraq show the jihadists as Davids and conventional armies
as lumbering Goliaths. The extremist groups can fragment and coalesce
with relative ease: they are “anti-fragile”, strengthening under attack.
They are not wedded to charismatic leaders, but are self-organising
networks that can operate independently of a single node of control, and
have a ready source of new personnel.
The complex, evolving nature of the groups suggests that the US
strategy of increasing troop numbers in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan
won’t protect against jihadism. That conclusion is borne out by studies
of the effects of troop “surges” in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in
2012, both of which appear to have increased terrorism. “Real complex
systems do not resemble static structures to be collapsed; they are…
flexible, constantly respun spider webs,” in the words of a 2013 SMA study of insurgency.
“Human societies are complex, unpredictable, adaptive systems”
The drone strikes follow laws of unintended consequences, says Craig Whiteside
of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. “Killing a
charismatic leader may inspire a potent posthumous charismatic appeal,
or cause splintering that results in otherwise suppressed extreme
factions rising in prominence.”
The effects are felt in Manchester as well as Mosul. In her most recent book, Countering Terrorism,
Crenshaw writes, “Western military engagement has reinforced the
jihadist narrative that Muslims everywhere are targeted. It may have
made ISIS more determined to inspire rather than direct terrorism. Nor
has military action blocked jihadist organisations [in Iraq and
Afghanistan] from regrouping, regenerating, and expanding.”
The evolving nature of the message means it is difficult to combat by
broadcasting counter-narratives. Social networks ensure the message
feeds back rapidly to disenfranchised sympathisers in the West (see “Network effects“).
Data scientists from the Naval Postgraduate School have studied Twitter
feeds from ISIS strongholds before and after the US began bombing them
in late 2014. Before the bombing campaign, the tweets focused ire on
near enemies: local mayors, imams, police and soldiers. As the bombs
dropped, the tweets went international, calling for the destruction of
Western governments and civilians.
During the next three years, ISIS fighters or ISIS-inspired lone
wolves targeted innocents in Brussels, Paris, Orlando, San Bernardino,
Nice, Manchester and London. Atmospheric changes in social media reflect
changes in the ground-level politics of insurgency, and specifically a
willingness to export terrorism abroad. In the words of the sister of
Abedi, the Manchester attacker, he “saw the explosives America drops on
[Muslim] children in Syria, and he wanted revenge”.
Terrorist groups are seldom defeated by military force; they either
achieve political solutions, or they wither away because grievances are
solved or dissipate, or they alienate their supporters through excess
brutality. Conversely, the US-led bombings of civilians in Fallujah and
Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and the atrocities now being committed
by the Iraqi liberators against ISIS suspects and their families, risk
creating a new round of Sunni grievances.
The grievances of local populations inspire terror attacks around the world
Peter Byrne
MCPIX/REX/Shutterstock
According to a Pentagon-funded meta study of public opinion polls
taken during 2015 and 2016, the “vast majority” of Muslims in Iraq and
Syria do not support ISIS. But those who do cite religion or ideology
far less than social, economic and governance grievances. And in Mosul,
the study said, 46 per cent of the population believed coalition air
strikes were the biggest threat to the security of their families, while
38 per cent said ISIS was the greatest threat.
If Iraq’s economic and social infrastructure continues to
deteriorate, a global war on terror that has to date cost $4 trillion
will continue – and more civilian lives will be lost to jihadist attacks
in the countries involved and the West. “The Sunnis in Iraq have a
genuine grudge,” says Cabayan. “They were left out of the Shia-dominated
government that we set up; they are under attack, nobody is protecting
them. We can and should provide off-ramps for defeated ISIS members –
safety, jobs, civil rights. If not, after the fall of Mosul, we will be
facing ISIS 2.0.”
The counter-productive strategies go both ways. The immediate effect
of civilian casualties in terror attacks is generally to undermine the
ability of the attacked population to perceive the grievances of the
attacking group as genuine, and to strengthen the political desire to
hit back militarily. Retired US Navy captain Wayne Porter was naval
chief of intelligence for the Middle East from 2008 to 2011. He is
convinced that the “only solution” to terrorism is to deal with its root
causes.
“The only existential threat to us from terrorist attacks, real or
imagined, is that we stay on the current counter-productive,
anarchically organised, money-driven trajectory,” says Porter, who now
teaches counter-terrorism classes to military officers at the Naval
Postgraduate School. “Our current counter-terrorism strategy, which is
no strategy, will destroy our democratic values.”
When ISIS is driven from west Mosul in July, Mironova is back on the
battlefield, gathering more data about the fate of families accused of
collaborating. Extrajudicial punishment of Sunnis by Shia and Kurdish
forces is causing fear and resentment, and fuelling ISIS, which is far
from defeated.
“ISIS is like H2O. It can be in several states: ice, water
and vapour,” she says. “In Mosul, it was ice. We melted it. Now it is
water, flowing into the countryside, seizing towns. It can vaporise to
live and fight another day.”
Devoted to the cause
Jihadists fuse their individual identity with that of the group
ZUMA/REX/Shutterstock
What makes someone prepared to die for an idea? This is a question that concerns anthropologist Scott Atran
of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Resolution of Intractable
Conflicts. Research he has led in some of the most embattled regions of
the world, including in Mosul, suggests the answer comes in two parts.
Jihadists fuse their individual identity with that of the group, and
they adhere to “sacred values”.
Sacred values are values that cannot be abandoned or exchanged for
material gain. They tend to be associated with strong emotions and are
often religious in nature, but beliefs held by fervent nationalists and
secularists, for example, may earn the label too. Atran has found that
people in fighting groups who hold sacred values are perceived by other
members of their group as having a spiritual strength that counts for
more than their physical strength. What’s more, sacred values trump the
other main characteristic of extremists: a powerful group identity.
“When push comes to shove, these fighters will desert their closest
buddies for their ideals,” he says.
Atran argues that individuals in this state of mind are best understood, not as rational actors but as “devoted” actors.
“Once they’re locked in as a devoted actor, none of the classic
interventions seem to work,” he says. But there might be openings. While
a sacred value cannot be abandoned, it can be reinterpreted. Atran
cites the case of an imam he interviewed who had worked for ISIS as a
recruiter, but had left because he disagreed with their definition of
jihad. For him, but not for them, jihadism could accommodate persuasion
by non-violent means.
As long as such alternative interpretations are seen as coming from
inside the group, Atran says, they can be persuasive within it. He is
now advising the US, UK and French governments on the dynamics of
jihadist networks to help them tackle terrorism. Laura Spinney
Nip it in the bud
Deradicalisation programmes are the bedrock of counter-terrorism
strategies in many countries. They aim to combat extremism by
identifying individuals who have become radicalised, or are in danger of
becoming so, and reintegrating them to the mainstream using
psychological and religious counselling as well as vocational training.
In the UK, some 4000 people are reported to the government’s
anti-terror programme Prevent every year. The majority – 70 per cent –
are suspected Islamic extremists, but about a quarter are far-right
radicals, and that number is growing. Critics fear that these programmes criminalise and stigmatise
communities, families and individuals. In addition, there are questions
about who governments collaborate with for information and whether
public servants should be obliged to report potential radicals.
There is also very little evidence that the programmes work. Most
fail to assess the progress of participants, and rates of recidivism are
rarely studied. In a recent report, the UK parliament’s human rights
committee warned that the government’s counter-extremism strategy is based on unproven theories and risks making the situation worse.
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.
Fiske’s group has found ways to disrupt stereotypes by making people work together
to achieve a common goal, for example. Trivial contact involving “food,
festivals and flags” won’t cut it, she says. It has to be a goal people
care about and are prepared to invest in, such as a work project or
community build. Here, success depends on understanding the minds of
your collaborators – “rehumanising” them.
Changing perspectives Tania Singer
of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in
Leipzig, Germany, thinks brain training could achieve similar effects.
Social neuroscientists have identified two pathways in the brain by
which we relate to others. One mobilises empathy and compassion,
allowing us to share another person’s emotions. The second activates
theory of mind, enabling us to see a situation from the other’s
perspective.
Singer’s group recently completed a project called ReSource, in which 300 volunteers
spent nine months doing training, first on mindfulness, and then on
compassion and perspective taking. After just a week, the compassion
training started to enhance prosocial behaviours, and corresponding
structural brain changes were detectable in MRI scans.
Compassion evolved as part of an ancient nurturing instinct that is
usually reserved for kin. To extend it to strangers, who may see the
world differently from us, we need to add theory of mind. The full
results from ReSource aren’t yet published, but Singer expects to see
brain changes associated with perspective-taking training, too. “Only if
you have both pathways working together in a coordinated fashion can
you really move towards global cooperation,” she says. By incorporating
that training into school curricula, she suggests, we could build a more
cohesive, cooperative society that is more resilient to extremism. Laura Spinney
Network effects
A key feature of jihadist groups is their use of social networks to
propagate their ideas. “If you can disrupt those connections, that’s
probably your best shot at stopping people from becoming terrorists,”
says J. M. Berger at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague and co-author of ISIS: The state of terror.
He believes that the advent of social media has not only increased
the number of people extremist groups can reach, but also the potency of
their message, because it allows them to circumvent safeguards against
revisionism and hate speech. Those most susceptible to the propaganda,
his research suggests, are not the chronically poor or deprived, but
people experiencing uncertainty in their lives – recent converts, young
people who have just left the family home, those with psychiatric
problems.
Extremist groups are adept at fomenting collective uncertainty, for
example by provoking hostility between ethnic groups. At the same time,
they present themselves as upholders of clear and unwavering values, an
attractive message to individuals who are undergoing potentially
destabilising transformations. Through social networks, those
experiencing uncertainty can learn about and even enter into contact
with extremist networks.
The G7 recognised this with its recent statement that it will “combat the misuse of the internet
by terrorists”. But this is easier said than done, says Berger. “It’s
easy to demand social media companies do something about extremism, but
much harder to define what they should do in a way that is consistent
with the values of liberal democracies.” Laura Spinney
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