Senators, I appreciate your letting me, an anthropologist, relate my views on the U.S. government’s strategy and efforts to counter violent extremism and radicalization and the military’s role in these efforts. I’ve been with would-be martyrs and holy warriors from Morocco’s Atlantic shore to Indonesia’s outer islands, and from Gaza to Kashmir. My field experience and studies in diverse cultural settings inform my views.

We are fixated on technology and technological success, and we have no sustained or systematic approach to field-based social understanding of our adversaries’ motivation, intent, will, and the dreams that drive their strategic vision, however strange.

On the intelligence side, the Christmas Day bombing attempt was a deep failing, caused in part by too great a reliance on technology to the detriment of social intelligence. Computers, and the stochastic models and algorithms they use, are not well suited to pick up the significance of the almost unimaginable effort and anguish it took for one of the most respected men in a nation to swallow his pride and love of family and walk into an American embassy to say that his son was being dangerously radicalized. Widgets — for which there are billions of dollars-cannot do the job of socially sensitive thinkers — for whom there is relatively little concrete support — in creating alliances, leveraging non military advantages, reading intentions, building trust, changing opinions, managing perceptions, and empathizing (though not necessarily sympathizing) with others so as to understand, and change, what moves them to do what they do.

On the military side, career advancement in the armed forces privileges operational prowess and combat experience, which are necessary to gain victory in battles. But different abilities may be necessary for winning without having to fight, or for ending a war in Lincoln’s definitive sense of destroying enemies by making them into friends. As George Marshall understood, this is what American efforts at democratization abroad are ultimately about. Soldiers should be adequately trained and rewarded for the political mission they are now being asked to carry out, which requires cultural and psychological expertise at being social mediators, managers, and movers.

If you want to be relevant in dealing with the radicalization problem — and successful in the long run in stopping the next and future generations of disaffected youth from finding their life’s meaning in the thrill of taking on the world’s mightiest power — then you have to understand the pathways that take young people to and from political and group violence. Knowing these pathways, you can do what needs to be done.

The concept of science-based field research - embedded in potential hotspots and open to public verification and replication, with clear ways and means to falsify what is wrong - is often misunderstood in Washington. Most legislators and policy makers think we have a great deal of this type of research being undertaken and funded. We don’t.

The concept of science-based field research...is often misunderstood in Washington. Most legislators and policy makers think we have a great deal of this type of research being undertaken and funded. We don’t.

With assistance from the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation, ARTIS puts interdisciplinary teams in a conflict region to explore the nature of the conflict with leaders, community members, and youth. We follow up with an experimental design — which allows ready replication of initial results or falsification of our hypotheses — to understand pathways to and from violence.

The main security concern now isn’t from any organization, or from well-trained cadres of volunteers. The main security concern is from a Qaeda, an inspired viral social and political movement that abuses religion in the name of defending Muslims. This is particularly contagious among youth who are increasingly marginalized — economically, socially, politically — and in transition stages in their lives: immigrants, students, in search of friends, mates and jobs.

The popular notion of a “clash of civilizations” is woefully misleading. Violent extremism represents a crash of traditional territorial cultures, not their resurgence, as people unmoored from millennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity. Individuals now mostly radicalize horizontally with their peers, rather than vertically through institutional leaders or organizational hierarchies: in small groups of friends — from the same neighborhood or social network — or even as loners who find common cause with a virtual internet community.

Lack of economic opportunity often reliably leads to criminality. But given half a chance to take up a moral cause, some petty criminals become hyper-altruists ready to give up their lives for comrades and cause. This is one indication – our research reveals others – that economic opportunities alone may not turn people away from the path to political violence. Rather, youth must be given hopes and dreams of achievement, and plausible means to realize such hopes and dreams.

You must be logged in to leave a comment.