One more resource you should have a look at is the very recent book Leaving terrorism behind.

This excellent collection of essays is edited by Tore Bjorgo, and it covers both individuals and collective processes of disengagement from terrorism. The book is (partly) available through Google Books here. You can also buy it online here. I especially recommend you have a look at Part II (pp. 133-242), which has overviews of several de-radicalisation/de-mobilisation/rehabilitation programs – including the Barrett & Bokhari study I have linked to in my previous post.

Happy readings!

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to add a few resources on the topic of de-radicalization. As I told you during our class, ping-pong seems to be an effective weapon in de-radicalizing youth in the Middle East – this could well be, as noted by Mr. Randt, because it simply offers something to do, an escape valve which allows for socialization and expending the normal energy of young people without directing it to violence.

In any case, a good place to start is Richard Barrett and Laila Bokhari’s study “Deradicalization and rehabilitation programmes targeting religious terrorists and extremists in the Muslim world – an overview” (PDF available here). Another entry point is this post from another blog, the Insurgency Research Group blog, created an maintained by a group of scholars at London’d King’s College. Regarding the apparent success of Egypt’s de-radicalization program in “turning” Sayyed Imam al-Sharif, you can read about it here. The same blog (Foreign Policy Watch) then has a more critical follow up on the strengths and weaknesses of such de-radicalisation strategies. Another such critical assessment – but a longer and more scholarly one – is an essay by John Horgan (remember him from our readings on the psychology of terrorism?), entitled “Deradicalization or disengagement? – a process in need of clarity and a counterterrorism initiative in need of evaluation”. You can find the full text here, but I’ll leave you with just a taste of his main argument:

The basis of this article began with a simple premise – there is no evidence to suggest that disengagement from terrorism may result in deradicalization. For this and other reasons, particularly the growth of these diverse programmes, it may be worthwhile to seek greater conceptual clarity between the two. While there are a number of ways in which we can do this, one immediate objective is to engage in research to evaluate, through multiple means, the increasing prevalence of the deradicalization programmes worldwide. The otherwise unverified and often spurious claims to success by the proponents of some of these programmes does not mean that we should dismiss their claims, rather we should engage in efforts to ask one of the most basic questions in all counterterrorism: do they actually work (and why?).

If you remember, the largest such programs (that we know of) are in place in several countries, mostly in the Muslim world. They include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and Indonesia. Below I leave you a number of links where you can read about individuals programs in these countries, as well as about institutional learning between them – that is, how countries adopt strategies that have been tried elsewhere and seem sucessful.

Bennet, D. (2008) How to defuse a human bomb

Rehabilitating the Jihadists (an IISS report on the Saudi initiative)

Zoepff, C (2008) Deprogramming Jihadists

One program that has both been praised and criticized is Indonesia. Al-Jazeera has a nice, short report on it, watch it below:

The BBC also has a report on Saudi Arabia’s re-education program under the syggestive title of “Killing terror with kindness”. Watch it here:

This time, through the words of Mr. Keith Olberman – from American TV station MSNBC:

As promised, for those of you interested in the theme of fear – and particularly how that concept/emotion has political relevance today – here go a few more sources for your reading pleasure:

First off, you may want to look at Corey Robin’s 2004 book, Fear: the history of a political idea. I realize this may be a difficult book – it is a dense work of political theory, and it was clearly not written with an undergraduate audience in mind, but do not get hung up on on that. It’s OK if you are a little bored at textual discussions of Hobbes’ thought, but the important thing is for you to try and get the general ideas, the larger arguments he is making in this book about the importance of far in moderna dn contemporary political life. I would especially recommend chapters 1-4 (inclusive), as he touches on the relationship between fear and terror. If you liked that, a more generalist book is Joanna Bourke’s 2006 work, Fear: a cultural history. Sadly, it’s not available for preview with Google Books, but you can buy it fairly cheap at Amazon. However, it is less relevant to the specific discussions and issues raised by our classes.

The post 9-11 world has generated a number of works dealing with fear and anxiety – especially of terrorism and political violence, and especially in the U.S. (less so about Europe). Certainly one of the best places to start would be David Altheide‘s recent book Terrorism and the politics of fear. Another good reference for you to consult is Frank Furedi’s self-explanatory Politics of Fear (2007). For the very specific case of America, Peter Stearn’s study American Fear: the causes and consequences of high anxiety is an interesting starting point.

An interesting parallel, in terms of threats which are perceived in disproportionate terms to the risk they actually pose, is with crime in most Western countries. There is definitely a politics of fear working there, and it holds important insights to our discussions about terrorism too. A good entry point into this discussion is the work of critical criminologist Murray Lee, and especially his book Inventing fear of crime: criminology and the politics of anxiety.

If you are interested in the psychology of fear – and indeed the neuro-psychological theories of what fear is, how it happens in our bodies and our minds – there is some literature, although not much of it is very light/accessible. One thing you can find on Google Books is the Handbook of Emotions, which has a chapter (44) specifically discussing the psychology of fear and anxiety, by Arne Oehman (pp. 709-730). However, bear in mind that this is a reference work, written by and for specialists, and is therefore far from an easy read - it is full of technical jargon about such things as the amygdala and the hippocampus (!!).

Finally, we discussed the concept of probability neglect (a kind of cognitive bias) – which is a technical way of saying that people who are under stress, face unmitigated uncertainty, or have suffered a traumatic event will most likely disregard actual probabilities when they assess threats and make decisions. In other words, even if they know boarding a plane carries very little risk statistically (say, 1 chance in 1.3 million of the plane crashing), they will still feel afraid and/or avoid flying. Now, both the requied reading (the text by Muller) and the suggested text by Cass Sunstein discuss probability neglect as an important component of the politics of fear associated with terrorism. But I found it funny that at some point our class discussion focused on the parallels (or not) between terrorism and claimate change. Without my knowledge, we were rehearsing some of the arguments Cass Sunstein makes in one of his most recent publication, the book Worst Case Scenarios, the fist chapter of which is precisely called “Of terrorism and climate change” (ch. 1, pp. 17-70).

Happy reading!!

Last class we discussed how our perceptions of terrorism as a threat are linked to the politics of fear. If you recall, I recommended you should read a short piece on precisely how (public) narratives of danger and threat contribute to that politics of fear. The passage I would like you to read is extracted from the book Writing the War on Terrorism, written by Dr. Richard Jackson. You can find it on Google Books, here. If you can, read from pages 92-95 – the beggining of the chapter entitled “Writing threat and danger”. I leave you with a suggestive excerpt, which raises/echoes some of the points we covered during our last session:

A study of the location and nature of terrorist attacks themselves confirms the view that terrorism actually poses a negligible risk to the personal safety of Americans or Europeans. In geographical terms, the vast majority of terrorist attacks occur in a very small number of countries – Israel, Russia, Colombia, Kashmir, Algeria, Afghanistan and since May 2003, Iraq. Terrorism, in other words, is almost always linked to a relatively small number of ongoing political conflicts; the vast majority of the world’s 200 or so states face extremely low levels of risk. The nature of terrorist attacks reveals a similar kind of picture: proportionally, most terrorist violence is directed at property rather than persons and the majority of attacks involve few or no fatalities at all. (…) Overall, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has been stable or falling for some time. The random mass casualty terrorism that we are constantly told to expect is actually extremely rare. This is because, as on terrorism expert put it, ‘terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead (Jenkins 1998: 230). Mass casualties are often counter-productive to terrorist aims – they alienate their supporters and can provoke harsh reprisals from the authorities – as well as being unnecessary – a phoned-in bomb threat is usually sufficient to cause widespread panic. In reality, most terroris violence is directed at symbolic targets; its aim is to create a media spectacle in order to communicate some kind of political message. It is instrumental violence, or ‘propaganda of the deed’.

Hope you find the rest of the text interesting! And since our discussion was – as usual – cut short by our tight schedule, feel free to comment and share your own thoughts.

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Dear class,

It became apparent last class that some of you (a lot of you?) were not too happy with our discussion of “social movement theory”, either because it was too much to swallow in 50 mns, or because it was too abstract. I apologize if I did not come across in a clearer, easier manner, but I needed to put at least some of that content across before we got to next class. In any case, here is a shorter, hopefully more useful overview with some extra materials for you:

1) Social movement theory, as the name clearly indicates, provides a conceptual frame to study social movements. As I mentioned in class, there are characteristics that help define what a social movement is/what it does:

A social movement is a form of collective action outside normal institutional channels. In other words, they are kind of informal political participation. This means that in a democracy like Germany, you are not happy with current anti-terrorism legislation, you could try and effect change through the German state institutions. You could for instance contact your elected member of parliament to raise the concerns with her/him, or you could try to get elected by running a campaign focused on that issue. But if instead you mobilized friends and acquaintances, and other members of civil society, and together you formed a protest movement which sought to change the legislation through non-instituional means (like protesting in front of the Bundestag every day, or symbolically burning the text of the legislation in front of TV cameras, or distribute pamphlets to people passing by), you would have formed a social movement.

From this first aspect, we reach two other characteristics. The first is that social movements are change-oriented in their claims and goals – meaning that through their collective actions, they try to change something which they identified as a problem in need of solving. In the case of my example, all of the people in the social movement share the belief that current German anti-terrorism legislation is wrong (for a variety of reasons, no need to get into that just yet). They have a grievance, and they want to address that. This is why Charles Tilly has often referred to his own research on social movements as a study in the politics of contention, or contentious politics.

The second characteristic of social movements is that they usually makes claims on the State or some other authority which they believe has the capacity to address their problem/grievance and change it for the better. David Meyer elaborates: “The state has the capacity to process claims, adjudicate disputes, and make decisions binding on losers. Movements may also seek to enlist or provoke other social or political institutions, both below and above the level of the nation-state, to augment their influence on the state. Nonetheless, the state remains the focal point of social movement claims and activities.” (Mayer 2004: 166)

Moreover, social movements exhibit a degree of organization. Although a social movement is not an organization per se, it is an organized way to mobilize resources. In other words, even if the social movement you started against German anti-terrorism law did not turn into an official organization (like an NGO or a political party), and even if your social movement does not comprise any organizations who share your vision and your goals (like a citizen’s council, or the policemen’s association), there still has to be an organization of activities: someone has to plan events, write texts, invite people to attend rallies, paint protest signs, etc.

This means that social movements develop what Charles Tilly calls a repertoire. In other words, since they are acting collectively outside/at the margins of formal political institutions, they cannot use the processes/tools for change available to them in state bureaucracy (such as legislative petitions, or police complaints). Social movements have thus developed their own set of strategies for action. Charles Tilly identified three key dimensions of social movement strategies:

1. a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target authorities (let us call it a campaign)

2. employment of combinations from among the following forms of political action: creation of special-purpose associations and coalitions, public meetings, solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, statements to and in public media, and pamphleteering (call the variable ensemble of performances the social movement repertoire); and

3. participants’ concerted public representations of WUNC: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment on the part of themselves and/or their constituencies (call them WUNC displays)

Also, social movements has some degree of persistence in time. That means that they are not spontaneous and short-lived events (like a single protest, or a single person who sent 100 letters to the government, and then suddenly stopped without mobilizing anyone else, organizing another event, or achieving some of his/her goals). Rather, they define an agenda, and they organize events which seek to achive that agenda over time with some degree of consistency in their methods, members, etc..

Social movements, therefore are crucially about the mobilization of resources. These resources can be materials resources (like money, or computers, or mobile phones), but also moral resources, or cultural ones. (Wikipedia’s page on social movement theory, despite very basic, provides a good, well-referenced introduction to this). For instance, the social movement we have been using as an example so far (trying to change current German anti-terrorism law), would be a good collective way of mobilizing human resources (people, such as volunteers to distribute pamphlets), but also moral resources (imagine you invited a tortured innocent man who was very famous, and has spent years talking about the need to ban torture in all forms), as well as cultural ones (if you organized a rally in front of the Bundestag, and you got Tokyo Hotel to play there and publicly speak in support of your cause, therefore drawing on their power as a cultural icon in Germany to boost your message).

This shows that social movements are part of larger political processes, and respond to needs and opportunities within the political process. In other words, the fact that new anti-terrorist law has been passed in Germany, and the fact that there has been some initial reluctance and heavy discussion in the formal political institutions opens up a series of opportunities for your social movement to act.

Finally, and crucailly for our next class, social movements work through a mechanism which authors have called “framing”. A frame is like a shared story, a shared narrative. For instance, in California there was recently a legislative initiative to ammend the state constituion and ban same-sex marriage (which has previously been made legal in California and several other states). The legislative proposal, which was democratically voted on, was knows as Proposition 8 (or Prop 8). If you had travelled to california recently, and you found yourself in the middle of a protest, you would have probably had difficulty in understanding the message they were putting across – how would you understand signs of “Say no to Prop 8″? That would probably mean nothing to you, because (i) you were not within the frame of that social movement, and (ii) their framing strategy had not been successful outside the US (in other words, their narrative had not reached you, or had not made a sufficient impact on you, to either understand the issue, or take their side). Next Monday, when we discuss the concepts of ideology and religion as explaining factors in terrorist activities, we will be speaking precisely of that – frames or narratives, and their imporance in mobilizing people to act.

Which brings us to the crucial point: why on Earth would I spend so much time talking about social movement theory, and what dos it have to do with our topic, terrorism??

As you may have realized by now, terrorist groups or terrorist organizations can be defined as social movements, as in most cases – as we have discussed in class – terrorism is a tactic employed by individuals working within a group os some sort, rather than working alone. Whether this means that a group evolves from a peaceful social movement to a terrorist one (i.e. emplying political violence in the ways we analysed in session 2) – as Mr. Kien suggested – or whether they have employed violent means from the start, the point is that terrorist organization share most (perhaps even all) of the other characteristcs of social movements listed above.

OK, so as descriptions and labels go, social movement theory can be applied to the study of terrorist groups. But why should it? What are the advantages of using this conceptual framework? To help you answer that, below I provide you with some readings suggestions…

Further reading

1. Social Movement theory (general reading)

Della Porta, Donatella & Mario Diani (2006) Social Movements – an introduction

McAdam et al. (1996) Comparative perspectives on social movements

Snow et al. (2004) The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (if you are interested in this book, let me know, I have the digital version in a PDF file I can send)

Tarrow, Sydney (1994) Power in movement: social movements, collective action, and politics

Tilly, Charles (2004) Social Movements, 1768-2004

2. Social movement theory & political violence

Della Porta, D. (1995/2006) Social movements, political violence and the state: a comparative analysis of Italy and Germany

Tilly, Charles (2003) The politics of collective violence

Wiktorowicz, Quintan (ed.) (2004) Islamic Activism – a social movement theory approach

3. Social movement theory & terrorism

Della Porta, D. (2001) “Terror against the State” in Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology

Gentry, Caron (2004) “The relationship between new social movment theory and terrorism studies” in Terrorism and Political Violence 16 (2): 274-293

Hello good people,

First of all, just let me say that I thought class last week went quite well, especially when it came to the group discussion at the end. Some very good points were raised, on both sides. However, as always, there were a few things that were left unsaid, and a couple of doubts that could not be cleared in our limited class schedule. So…

1. Regarding the “states that sponsor terrorism” list published and maintained by the U.S. Department of State, you can find it in different places. As you can see, I was both right and mostly wrong when, in discussing with Mr. Hellman and Mr. Martens, I said Lybia had not yet been taken off the list. This is because the State Department’s information management on this issue is quite ambiguous: while here they no longer list Lybia (nor, for that matter North Koreo or Iraq), the page  provides a link to a page for “further details” and there they still list Lybia, and although they discuss the several steps in the gradual relaxation of relations between the US (and UK) and Lybia, they do not offer any evidence as to Lybia being taken off the list. Upon closer inspection, you may notice why that is – they have just redirected you to the 2005 Country Report on Terrorism, which was only updated until April 2006. So, if you check the 2006 or 2007 reports (available here and here, respectively), you will see that Lybia has indeed been taken off the list – although no explanation is offered in any of the reports as to why or how.

Al Jazeera, however, has covered Condoleeza Rice’s recent (and historic) visit to Lybia quite well, watch the two videos below:

If you want to read more about the list itself, and also about the process of taking states off it (North Korea and Lybia being the most prominent cases), I would recommend this page, prepared for the About.com site by Amy Zalman. It provides a good, short overview of the main issues surrounding the list, discusses the process of adding states to the list and taking them off the list, and points to a series of other pages/resources, including legislative and official US documents. (By contrast, the Wikipedia page on the issue is less compelling – although it discusses each case individually, it provides no real explanation oh how the list works, and is very poor on references).

Another great place to learn about this issue (state sponsorship, but also how the U.S defines and implements policy on the topic) is to look at the relevant CRS reports – especially this, this, and this. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) consistently produces interesting, exhaustive and though-provoking reports on a variety of issues. They are a division of the Library of Congress (LOC, the world’s largest library), and they are supposed to produce all the background research so that legislators (elected members of the US congress) can base their decisions and policy-making on as much information as possible. Because they produce their reports at the request of legislators in Congress, officially their reports are not for public viewing. However, several people (including researchers of the CRS themselves, some of which I interviewed) regularly leak the reports so that American citizens benefit from reading them as well. One of the best collections can be found here, and they also provide links to other collections, most notable the ones maintained by the State Department and OpenCRS. You should take advantage of this great resource, and in particular browse the many many CRS reports on terrorism, covering almost all the issues we discuss in our class, and a few others.

2. During our discussion of the possible strategic advantages of sponsoring terrorism, Mr. Krieger and Mr. Roessler made the very good argument that once you have trained, equipped, financed and hosted a terrorist group in order to achieve you foreign policy goals, it may not always be the easiest thing to keep them under your control – they may turn against you, or they may simply pursue a much more independent agenda that starts conflicting with the state’s agenda who sponsored them. However, as I pointed out, the example that was chosen to illustrate this – the support given by the U.S. to the Afghan Mujahedin during the 1980′s as they fought the occupying Soviet forces – was inaccurate/misleading. The Mujahedin did not become/turn into the Taliban – on the contrary, the Taliban rose to prominence (and then took power) on a “security agenda” which was aimed against the abuses committed by former Mujahedin commanders all around the countryside. If you want to know more about this transition, and the genesis of the Taliban in Southern Afghanistan, I would recommend you start with Ahmed Rashid‘s classical Taliban – militant Islam, oil and fundamentalism in Central Asia. Or you can read Steve Coll‘s excellent Ghost wars – the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasio to September 10th 2001. (You can also watch a 3-part interview with Ahmed Rashid here, here and here, where he discusses the nature of the Taliban – insurgency or terrorism.)

And even if it had been the case that the Mujahedin turned into the Taliban, two points are worth raising. The first is that state sponsorship of the Mujahedin was not limited to the U.S.. Although they played a major role, their concerns about not engaging the Soviet forces directly, nor to escalate the Cold War on the Afghan issue, made them create a coalition of state-sponsorship for the Mujahedin (who, to return to definition, were much more of a guerilla/insurgency, than a terrorist group per se) – a coalition which included Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, but also Israel (who quietly allowed weapons to be supplied/shipped from its territory) and a host of other Gulf States, which tolerated and sometimes encouraged the flow of young men and petro-dollars to Afghanistan’s battle-ground. In fact, if you don’t want to read about this, watch the brilliant movie Charlie Wilson’s War, based on the eponymous book by George Crile – this movie is definitely on the list for the review! (And with scenes this good by Philip Seymour Hoffman, it’s a fun learning experience ;-))

The second point is that the Taliban are neither a monolithic, unified group, nor are they the same political organization that rose to power in Afghanistan in the 1990′s. Recent research, especially the work of Antonio Giustozzi, suggests that the coalition forces are now facing a neo-Taliban, a new generation of fighters, with its own political agenda. If you have any interest in the issue, I heartily recommend his 2007 book Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan.

3. During our discussion in class, I also mentioned the issue of terrorist financing. Although it was somewhat outside the focus of our discussion (we will talk about terrorist financing in session’s 11 and 12, and perhaps 13), it was relevant for two reasons: (i) state sponsorship (both active and passive) often includes the financial networks that support the activities of terrorist groups, and (ii) one of the forms taken by UN sanctions against the financing of terrorist was a list (the so-called Consolidated List, which can be found here), which also featured an “easy to get listed, almost impossible to get de-listed” bias. The UN has created two committees to work on these issues: the 1267 Committee (dealing specifically with the provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 1267), and the more general Counter-terrorism Committee (CTC). You can read about both here, or here and here. As for the problems raised by these sanctions (an issue often discussed under the names “smart sanctions” or “targeted sanctions”), I had mentioned the outsandting work done by Prof. Thomas Biersteker (and Sue Eckert). You can read about the whole project here in fascinating detail, as well as see a list/timeline of initiatives they were involved in, and a list of the papers and reports they have published on the subject. I think this is an interesting thing for you to look at for two reaons: (i) to show how complex it can be to implement policy against terrorism (in this case terrorist financing), and (ii) to show what understanding terorism and studying it can achieve – in this case committed scholars have actually made a difference, making the legal regime targeting terrorist finances more transparent, more aware of its mistakes, and smarter in the way it targets individuals and their finances.

4.One issue that I felt wasn’t discussed enough during groupwork in class is the actual effectiveness of “listing” countries as state-sponsors of terrorism, as the U.S. government does. Listing a state is a powerful symbolic gesture – “naming and shaming” strategy – and that alone is an important dimension of the listing process, given what we have studied about terrorists usually trying to legitimate their course of action, and using violence as a means of political communication. But much more than a symbolic gesture, the U.S. government policy of listing has very real consequences in terms of sanctions. As detailed by the State Department,

Designating countries that repeatedly provide support for acts of international terrorism as state sponsors of terrorism imposes four main sets of U.S. Government sanctions:

1. A ban on arms-related exports and sales.
2. Controls over exports of dual-use items, requiring 30-day Congressional notification for goods or services that could significantly enhance the terrorist-list country’s military capability or ability to support terrorism.
3. Prohibitions on economic assistance.
4. Imposition of miscellaneous financial and other restrictions, including:
5. Requiring the United States to oppose loans by the World Bank and other international financial institutions;
6. Exception from the jurisdictional immunity in U.S. courts of state sponsor countries, and all former state sponsor countries (with the exception of Iraq), with respect to claims for money damages for personal injury or death caused by certain acts of terrorism, torture, or extrajudicial killing, or the provision of material support or resources for such acts;
7. Denying companies and individuals tax credits for income earned in terrorist-list countries;
8. Denial of duty-free treatment of goods exported to the United States;
9. Authority to prohibit any U.S. citizen from engaging in a financial transaction with a terrorist-list government without a Treasury Department license; and
10. Prohibition of Defense Department contracts above $100,000 with companies in which a state sponsor government owns or controls a significant interest.

This means the adoption of a confrontational approach, that seeks to isolate states designated as sponsors of terrorism. The thinking behind this is that sanctions – rather than incentives – will be the most effective way to “convience” a foreign nation’s government to change policy on terrorism. But is this really so? Let’s say country x is listed as a state-sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. government. Let’s futher say that country x has a population with widespread sentiments against the U.S and its foreign policy in the region. And let’s say that the government of country x has always had difficult diplomatic relations with the U.S., and is using sponsorship of a regional terrorist group to counter the military presence of the US is neighbouring countries. On top of this, country x cannot spend an enormous ammount of its state budget on regional foreign policy, so state sponsorship of the terrorist groups makes for a cheap foreign policy strategy. Given this scenario, (i) will sanctions work on a government that was already antagonistic of the US, and perhaps saw itself as responding to previous grievances already? Or will sanctions actually harden the stance of country x’s government, as it will perceive a further grieavance against the US? (ii) Will sanctions make it more difficut or easier for the government of country x to win elections/gain popular support and continue its policy of state-sponsorship of terrorism? And (iii) will significant economic sanctions be effective in convincing country x to invest more in commerce and a full-fledged foreign policy towards both its neighbours and the U.S.? Or will they simply increase the costs of trade policy and diplomacy, versus the continuation of the relatively cheap support for the terrorist group?

You may have noticed that the UN Security Council follows a somewhat different policy – it calls on states to do everything possible against terrorism (incuding stopping any support activities), but it lists/sanctions only individuals and entities like NGO’s, charities or companies, not states. In other words, it follows a policy which emphasizes incentives (“carrots”) rather than sanctions (“sticks”) against governments.

5. Finally, and back to state-sponsorhips of terrorism, a few questions for you to think about (and perhaps engage with in the comments box, if you feel so inclined):

• Do you think that this list is a useful tool in fighting state-sponsorship of terrorism, or is it counter-productive? Why?

• Why do you think countries like Cuba are included, but others like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan are not?

• If you were a foreign-policy maker (for instance here in Germany), how would you propose to deal with the issue of state-sponsorship of terrorism?

• Do you think it is conceptually useful to talk about active and passive state-sponsorhip? If so, was Germany a passive sponsor/supporter of terrorism? (Byman writes: “This passivity in the face of terrorism can be deadly. In conducting the September 11 attacks, al-Qa’ida recruited and raised money in Germany with relatively little interference, enjoyed financial support from many Saudis unobstructed by the government in Riyadh, planned operations in Malaysia, and sent operatives to America. None of these governments are “sponsors” of al-Qa’ida—indeed, several were and are bitter enemies of the organization—but their inaction proved as important, if not more so, than the haven the group enjoyed in Afghanistan in enabling al-Qa’ida to conduct the attacks.” [my emphasis])

I think for now this is enough food for thought. If you have any further doubts, or any interested in further readings for any of the topics covered here, you can always email me.

As you may have noticed, our last class was somewhat imbalanced – there was a lot of presentation, groupwork and extremely productive class discussion, but there wasn’t so much time left for me to lay out some key ideas about psychological analysis of terrorism.

In a way, that is normal given the class model used in Hildesheim. I am used to a model with both lectures – packed large rooms full of students where a lecturer basically talks for 90% of the time, going over all the key issues, authors and texts – and seminars, that is to say, small groups of students with a seminar leader/lecturer who focus for 90% of the time on discussing everthing that was taught in the lecture, or was in the readings. In Hildesheim, however, classes have to be a bit of both, lecture and seminar. In addition, they have to fit enough time for your colleagues to present, and to discuss their presentation with you.

As a result, I have to make hard choices: whether to talk more myself (which I don’t like as much) and make sure I clearly explain the authors, the ideas, the texts OR whether to give you the space and the time to discuss the issues (which I find very interesting and very productive, but takes up a lot of time).

So, this was a rather convoluted way to bring us to the issues discussed in our last class: psychology and terrorism. If you did the required readings before class, and if you were brave enough to tackle the suggested readings as well, you should be fine – meaning you should have a pretty clear understanding of the main theories out there. But just in case you are interested in reading more about it, here go a few other suggestions:

John Horgan, a political psychologist, is one of the key academics in the English-speaking world on psychological analyses of terrorism/political violence. He is the director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State. Among his books, the one most relevant to the topic would be “The psychology of terrorism”, which you can find here or here.

Jerrold Post is the other major reference in terms of psychological analyses of terrorism (surprise surprise, he is also a political psychologist). He is a professor at George Washington University (see his biography here), and is the author, among other books, of “The mind of the terrorist“.

Another reference work is a heavy edited volume by Bruce Bongar, Lisa brown, Larry Beutler, James Breckenridge and Philip Zimbardo, under the name “Psychology of terrorism” (unfortunately, it is only available as a hardcover, but you can check out the Google Books version)

Have fun, and get back to me – either through the comment box here on the blog, or via email – if you have any further questions or suggestions.

Hello class,

Related to our previous class on the psychological dimensions of terrorism, I thought the following article which has appeared recently in the NY Times might be of interest to some of you:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/magazine/09jihadis-t.html

In particular, notice the following excerpt:

Jilani and his colleagues are not just fighting a war of ideas. Though
the Saudi government tends to explain its rehabilitation program in
purely Islamic terms, as an effort to correct theological
misunderstandings, the new program also addresses the psychological
needs and emotional weaknesses that have led many young men to jihad
in the first place. It tries to give frustrated and disaffected young
men the trappings of stability — a job, a car, possibly a wife. Though
international human rights groups continue to sound the alarm about
Saudi Arabia’s habit of detaining suspects without charging them and
of punishing certain crimes with floggings and amputations, these
young men seem to have become the subjects of a continuing experiment
in counterterrorism as a kind of social work.

I suggest you take a look at the whole article, because besides the psychological dimensions we have explored in the last session, we will also be speaking about de-radicalization programs as strategies of counter-terrorism in another class.

Good reading, and see you soon!

By the way, the photo above (which I will be changing every now and then), is from Associated Press, and it depicts an Afghan policeman, armed and alone on the street, guarding the entrance to the Indian Embassy in Kabul, which was the target of a suicide bombing in arly July this year. The death toll was initially estimated at 41, later revised up to 58, with many more injured. Subsequently, both the Afghan and Indian governments denounced the involvement of the Pakistani military intelligence agency (ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence) in the attack. (An issue related to the topic of our next class, on state-sponsorhip of terrorism).