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How
did academic research and theory explain the causes and motives behind
terrorist activities prior to the ‘war on terror’?
Lorenzo Vidino: While it is unquestionable that since the
September 11, 2001 attacks there has been unprecedented growth in the quantity
and quality of terrorism studies, the discipline was already well-established
before that tragic event. Not unlike today, there were several competing
theories and different levels of analysis borrowing from psychology, the social
sciences, anthropology and other disciplines. But while there were many
professional and empirically-grounded studies, it must be said that many
theories were based on personal feelings, political persuasions and emotions
rather than on evidence and analysis.
An important yet highly controversial debate focused on
the role of education and poverty as causes of terrorism. Others linked
terrorism to the inability to voice political opinions and democratically
trigger political change. Several studies consistently and convincingly proved
that most terrorists were not uneducated and poor and most lived in democratic
societies, yet this debate, while less intense, is still alive today. It must
also be said that, absent a universally accepted definition of terrorism – with
many supporting the idea that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom
fighter” – it was (and still is) difficult to find commonly accepted paradigms.
And
what about the study of why individuals become terrorists? How has
psychological research traditionally sought to explain why individuals are
motivated to undertake terrorist activities?
The study of the causes of terrorism has traditionally
focused on either the individual or the collective level of analysis. On both
levels the psychological approach is crucially important. A debate that was
largely resolved before 9/11 revolved around the mental sanity of terrorists,
with overwhelming evidence supporting the position that the vast majority of
terrorists are sane and, in most cases, quite intelligent individuals.
The psychological approach can be immensely useful but is
very difficult to pursue, as, for obvious reasons, access to terrorists is not
easy to obtain. While some scholars have conducted remarkable interviews and
direct psychological analyses of terrorists, many studies seek to identify the
psychology of terrorists through secondary sources such as court documents,
journalistic investigations, and intelligence reports.
Each of these sources has potentially damning intrinsic
flaws, starting with its accuracy. Even assuming these sources do provide
reliable information, the facts that can be drawn from them are mostly things like
a person’s age, marital status, education, and social habits. In some cases
they might reveal more intimate details, such as a person’s political views,
personality traits, or religious persuasion. Political scientists and
psychologists can base sound analyses on such information. But, as many experts
admit, these details hardly capture all the elements of the intricate and
intimate psychological processes that cause a person to become a terrorist.
Direct accounts provided by terrorists or former terrorists could potentially
provide more insight into these dynamics, yet they are few and far between. For
various reasons, very few scholars have been able to conduct interviews with
individuals who have undergone the radicalization process. A handful of former
terrorists of different political persuasions has published memoirs, in some
cases providing interesting insights into how the individuals radicalized. Yet
most of the facts revealed in these autobiographical sketches are difficult to
verify and some of them have been directly challenged. The problem therefore
seems to be twofold. First, extensive information is available only on a
relatively small number of terrorists. This limitation is seemingly inescapable
due mostly to privacy laws and the difficulties involved in accessing the
relevant data. Therefore, studies of large samples of individuals, while useful
in finding commonalities and tracing profiles, are unlikely, at least at this
point in time, to yield deep insights into the radicalization process.
What
has changed since 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’? Have we seen an increase in
attempts to offer a more novel explanation of the causes and psychology of
terrorism?
The events of 9/11 have triggered a surge in terrorism
studies and this has unquestionably brought new insights. For starters, given
the roots of the attacks, much of the analysis has shifted to religiously
motivated terrorism. With some notable exceptions (such as Mark Juergensmeyer’s
seminal Terror in the Mind of God), Western academics had focused on forms of
terrorism driven by nationalist or purely political causes and relegated
religiously motivated terrorism to a secondary position, possibly because that
kind of terrorism had surfaced in the West with less intensity and frequency than
other forms. Scholars began wondering about the peculiarity of religiously
motivated terrorism and, in some cases in particular, about its links to
Islamic culture and theology.
At the same time there has been an interesting shift
among large sections of the academic community to the individual level of
analysis of the causes of terrorism. While macro-level theories are still very
much valid and debated, a significant amount of attention has been devoted to
what has commonly been referred to as radicalization – the real buzz-word of
the last ten years in the counter-terrorism field.
Yet few issues have proven more divisive and
controversial among experts, both within and outside government, than trying to
identify the reasons that drive people to embrace radical views and then to act
on them in violent ways. As a consequence, and absent reliable supporting
evidence, theories about radicalization abound. Some focus on structural
factors such as political tensions and cultural cleavages, sometimes referred to
as the root causes of radicalization. Others emphasize personal factors, such
as the shock of a life-changing event or the influence of a mentor.
But a consensus seems to be forming which accepts that a
simple causation-based approach is incorrect and that, on the contrary, it is
the complex interaction of various structural and personal factors that leads
people to radicalize by embracing a certain ideology. For example, the reasons
that drive a London-born, university-educated and successful young man to
embrace al Qaeda’s ideology are probably quite different from those that drive
an illiterate boy from a famished village in rural Somalia. Yet both
individuals could end up embracing the same cause and conducting a terrorist
operation together. It is increasingly obvious to researchers that a
one-size-fits-all explanation makes little sense.
Despite this positive development there are still major
problems and flaws in how the individual causes of terrorism are studied. As
mentioned above, conducting in-depth interviews and background research on
terrorists is, when possible, very useful. But even those data do not tell us
why individuals who are likely to have experienced similar frustrations and
feelings have not radicalized. In other words, if 100 individuals are in
similar predicaments we tend to study the one who became a terrorist. But it
would be equally important to study why the other 99 did not become
terrorists—and this study would have practical policy relevance. Of course, the
challenge of conducting this kind of study is enormous.
To
what extent are we still reliant upon ‘traditional’ explanations of terrorist
activities? Are the likes of Abrahams, Krueger and Sageman still as important
to the study of terrorism?
As in other disciplines, current scholarship can confirm
or completely negate previous work, but for the most part it builds on it.
Moreover, terrorism is not a static phenomenon and is changing at unprecedented
speed, largely due to the pace of technological developments and globalization.
It goes without saying that certain theories elaborated for local groups in the
19th century do not apply to modern transnational and technologically savvy
groups like al Qaeda. Yet many theories do still apply and it is impossible to
study contemporary terrorism without a foundation in them.
Are
the more traditional explanations of terrorism sufficient for understanding the
contemporary threat posed by transnational terrorist organizations and lone
wolves such as Anders Breivik? Are less conventional attempts at explaining the
motives behind terrorism worth pursuing?
One of the most lively post-9/11 debates in the field was
whether al Qaeda’s and, more generally, jihadist terrorism constituted a new
kind of terrorism, compared to the “old terrorism” of the IRA, the Red
Brigades, the Palestinian groups and so on. Many, starting with Walter Laqueur,
argued that al-Qaeda and jihadist terrorism was completely different from past
forms because it was millenarian, it operated globally, it sought and could achieve
carnage and destruction on an unprecedented scale, and could not be confronted
with negotiations. Its religious motivation also gave it an unprecedented level
of fanaticism that authorized its adherents to kill as many people as possible,
while globalization and technologies previously unavailable terrorists made it
possible for them to do so.
Many argued, however, that similar developments had been
experienced in the past.
Transnational, informal groups had always existed,
starting with the anarchist movements of the 19th century. Technological
developments have always allowed the next generation of terrorists to be more
lethal than previous ones. And there have always been groups, whether
religiously motivated or not, that sought wanton destruction.
A similar analysis has been applied to the phenomenon of
lone wolves. The attacks carried out by Breivik (or, on a smaller scale, by
other individual terrorists such as Mohammed Merah in Toulouse) challenge many
of the assumptions about terrorism, such as the focus on groups and
organizations. But, once again, today’s lone wolves are hardly a novelty, as
examples of individual terrorists date back centuries (once again the
anarchists of 19th and early-20th centuries provide examples of the
phenomenon).
In a nutshell, there is no question that blindly applying
old models to the continuously evolving phenomenon of terrorism is a flawed
exercise. But history and “traditional” scholarship are still a valuable (and
often under-appreciated) aide.
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