DIIS Comment

The real trouble with radicalization

Three challenges that the research community needs to address

The return of foreign fighters to Europe has sparked new debate on how and where radicalization begins and the emerging challenges relating to the treatment and prosecution of foreign fighters. However, as radicalization researchers - including think tanks and consultancies active in the field of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) - are actively discussing these topics, three challenges stand out, that we need to face in order to better understand radicalization processes and ways of countering them: The lack of a global, comparative research agenda, securing the “arm’s length” principle and finally the unfortunate absence of conflict analysis.

1. A more global research agenda, please
The recent return of foreign fighters to Western Europe has sparked new funding opportunities from governments and re-actualized the debate on radicalization. The agenda-setting is not a problem in itself, but research-wise the money to radicalization studies and think tanks is very much concentrated on the foreign fighters from/returnees to the West, which puts limitations on what we are observing/able to observe. Statistically, the number of returnees to the West is not close to the numbers originating from or returning to the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, Russia or the Arab Peninsula. If radicalization research focused equally on these areas, the interesting findings might not be that “yes they are Muslims”, “many of them are converts”, “many of them have a criminal track record” or “there are women among them too”. The trouble is that the findings often reflect or reflect on the prejudices prevalent in public debates in the West, either confirming or rejecting them, speaking to a particular audience that is and has been heavily affected by the parliamentarian or popular success of the rightwing parties. Unfortunately, money talks and sometimes implicitly dictates the research questions within this field, while radicalization research would be enriched by being more comparative, looking at experiences across regions and differences within countries, also the exotic ones.

One of the “sweeping” conclusions of West-centric radicalization research is that ideology or religion matters. Such trivial conclusions do not advance our understanding of the phenomena we are trying to understand and combat: If we want to understand radicalization, we must start to pose the necessary how(s): what are the elements of religion/ideology, how do they work in tandem with other elements that make people embrace violence such as culture, emotions, power, technology and the list could go on. What explains the differences across and within regions: Why are the terrorists behind the deadliest attack in Bangladesh not from the poor segment of society but among the rich private-university students who used to study abroad (in the West)? Why is Islamic State propaganda attracting the well-educated in some places while thugs and college drop-outs in other places?

Another problematic element of the west-centrism is that research on radicalization is often ahistorical: just go back some decades to the neighbouring countries e.g. Afghanistan where foreign fighters returned after the Soviets withdrew, and you will see an empirical case that resembles the foreign fighter-issue discussed in Europe today. Though CVE is a relatively new term, those countries have long been working on re-integration programs based on their experiences with the returnees. Maybe there are more universal lessons to be learned about “radicalization”, also lessons about those who re-engaged in battle in the 00’s. A broader pool of terrorist profiles would become visible, and we would discover patterns of continuity.

2. Research should remain…research, and critical
Since radicalization research and CVE are so closely linked to policy demands, public funding, and political agenda setting, researchers involved with these issues ought to be particularly critical in the way they demarcate and pose their research questions. Yet, the lack of “arm’s length” is a common challenge for all research fields that suddenly gets overwhelming public attention and a general challenge for many researchers who lack methodological clarity. There is, however, a credibility challenge in radicalization research, which stems from the fact that only few researchers have actually encountered the subjects of their study. In the 1990’s, research on comparative religious violence was driven by curious researchers such as Cynthia Mahmood or Mark Juergensmeyer, who travelled to conflict zones in order to study and meet the people they were writing about. Today, the field is full of “consultancy research” – surveys and recommendations coming out of consultancy firms and think tanks invented for attracting research funding. Sometimes these consultancies are seen as the “evidence-driven” research, while the work of people who have spent their lifetime studying religio-political violence are framed as “anecdotal”. Hence, we see reports that assess the threat from foreign fighters by merely counting the numbers of those who left and returned. It is a problem for the field that interview-based qualitative research which investigates motivations or justificatory narratives are often shunt aside as anecdotal, even though there are strong patterns and trends across the qualitative studies on religio-political violence that say more in detail about the exact components of ideology and pathways to violence than consultancy-driven surveys. Typically, CVE programs across the US and Western Europe are based on such survey research, and as a result they are focusing on “integration”, “assimilation”, mentoring unemployed youth or countering ideas about the evilness of the West. The comparative qualitative research points to additional but important conclusions that are not part of the CVE equation: the fact that the decision to join a battle often comes in the wake of political indignation (related to a political conflict), and jihadists who join a battle often hold the belief that religion obliges action in such cases. Among other things, this questions to what degree integration-initiatives, youth-mentoring and socio-economic initiatives (which are often part of the P/CVE package) is actually addressing the dynamics of radicalization or “just” performing other types of welfare functions.

3. The odd absence of conflict analysis
This leads to the third, but most important point: Radicalization research has become a field of research that is much closer to psychology than to conflict analysis. In fact, it lives mostly in isolation from peace and conflict research. There is a stunning lack of inquiry into the exact conflicts that attract and produce violent jihadists, maybe because the complicity of our own (Western) countries would stand out more clearly than is currently the case. Yet it is striking how the political individualization of radicalization has spilled heavily over on the way research is designed and carried out within this area. While Nordic radicalization researchers and CVE practitioners are in high demand internationally (in Denmark’s case we even have our own CVE model that is being exported to other countries), the peace-building, or conflict resolution emphasis is marginalized from P/CVE - what is often called the “softer” approaches to the threat of terrorism.

An emphasis on peace-building and peace research used to be the trademark of the Nordic approach (in Denmark the peace research at leading research institutions has been markedly reduced). The trouble is that terrorism and radicalization is not thought about as something that has to do with conflicts. It has developed a set of explanations that are forwarded isolated from what peace and conflict research has taught us about for instance conflict-extension mechanisms, conflict escalation mechanisms and not least conflict resolution mechanisms. Adding to this, there are some larger structures in the contemporary scholarly assessment of violent jihadism, which reproduce political narratives about the aggression of one part in the conflict. If one takes a closer look, the picture is of course more dynamic. The cold war meta-conflict was both the backdrop to the global spread of jihadism in the 1990s, but also to the jihadism in the 2000's, when born-again jihadists from the anti-Soviet era eyed a new aggressor. Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to attract foreign fighters because of the specific structure of the conflict: its history, its “Islam vs. the West” undertones, its cross-border nature, its function as a stage for regional rivalry and proxy wars, the particular role that religion has taken as both the revolutionary ideology and the state ideology and a lot more that has to do with the exact conflict-constellation. The attraction of Syria/Iraq as a battlefield for bored/socially marginalized/less intellectual/self realizing/awakened or remorseful gang members is, if anything, a story about a conflict that was not handled appropriately (with the right type of resources, insights, mediation attempts, de-escalation attempts, etc.) because, once again, terrorism blocked the ability to think of it as a conflict, putting on our conflict analysis glasses.

Contemporary CVE and radicalization research urgently need to pay attention to a different scale of analysis than the individual-centric approaches: on the conflicts that attract volunteers from around the world. Often the heavy investors and front-runners in CVE programming and (countering/preventing) radicalization work are also those countries who have militarily invested in and been part of the escalation of the conflicts. The CVE industry with its close linkages to government funding might in some instances be a meaningful social welfare activity. But it remains a short-sighted approach and in its worst versions it has started manifesting itself as a nationally chauvinistic approach that pushes out the troublemakers to other countries by for instance stripping foreign fighters of their citizenship. Meanwhile, the big “radicalizing” machinery will remain instability, persecution of particular groups (e.g. Sunni Muslims in the post-Saddam Iraq, Rohingyas in Myanmar) and the absence of peace-building initiatives. Often, the peace community is being ridiculed for wanting to sit down with the terrorists, but more often than not, history has shown that peace-building, stability-boosting initiatives are what matters for closing down the business of terrorism and its attraction.

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DIIS Experts

Mona Kanwal Sheikh
Global security and worldviews
Head of unit, Senior researcher
+45 4089 0476
The real trouble with radicalization
Three challenges that the research community needs to address