RadicalizationScholar goes to prison to study religious radicalization

University of Calgary postdoctoral scholar Ryan Williams never imagined his religious studies degrees would one day lead him to jail.

But it turns out prisons provide an important site for learning about the gravest concerns around radicalization and how society can better respond.

UCalgary reports thatthe visits to prison began in August 2013 when Williams, a University of Calgary alumnus who earned his Ph.D. in 2012 from the Faculty of Divinity in Cambridge, joined three colleagues on an 18-month study funded by Canada’s Economic and Social Research Council.

The researchers spent 260 days in two maximum security institutions in the United Kingdom and conducted sixty interviews with staff and 100 with prisoners — some of them convicted for terrorism – better to understand the differences between prison environments that support human growth and those that damage well-being and character.

“The first few visits were very hairy,” Williams says. “When you got used to it, though, you realized that if you approach people with humanity and with a spirit of kindness and politeness, you get that back.”

And it is exactly that interaction between expectation and outcome which Williams experienced first-hand that is at the crux of his work: research that has gained international prominence as the world seeks to understand the recent tragedies in Paris, and concern escalates about ISIS and terrorism across Europe and beyond.

In 2015 Williams returned to the University of Calgary as a postdoctoral scholar, where he also earned his master’s degree in religious studies. With the support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellowship, he will take what he learned from his prisons research to ask broader questions around human security, belonging and society.

“This is truly groundbreaking work,” says Tinu Ruparell, an associate professor in the Department of Classics and Religion and Williams’s postdoctoral supervisor.

“This is the first time a religious studies scholar has been able to go in and get to know these people who are so demonized; we don’t know what they are like or what their motivations are,” says Ruparell.

“Ryan Williams’ insight into one of society’s most urgent problems is helping community organizations, academia, law enforcement and anti-terror groups to understand and potentially mitigate this highly complex issue,” says Ed McCauley, vice-president (research).

“He is a wonderful example of the top-tier postdoctoral scholars who are building the university’s global leadership in our strategic research theme Human Dynamics in a Changing World: Smart and Secure Cities, Societies, and Cultures.”

Studying trust instead of radicalization opened doors
“You don’t necessarily think of trust or humanity when you think of terrorists,” says Williams. “But we went into those prisons with a goal of studying trust rather than radicalization; a concept that does not provide a very good social scientific starting point.”

Williams says the topic of trust opened up a lot of doors with prisoners that the subject of radicalization and extremism would have closed.

“We asked prisoners to give an example of when they have been trusted, what they were most proud of in their life,” Williams says. Fundamentally human questions that revealed, Williams says, that these prisoners were fundamentally human.

“Trust is something that binds the social fabric,” Williams says, “where criminalizing, stigmatizing and ‘othering’ certain groups based on their religion tears at that fabric.”

Sharing expertise on counterterrorism efforts locally and internationally
Williams says institutional support is key in getting your message out. He underlines that he has been very fortunate that the university, the Department of Classics and Religion and his supervisor have been very helpful, opening doors and providing opportunities, which is key for a postdoctoral fellow.

“My role is to act as a kind of critical interlocutor,” Ruparell says of his work with Williams. “I can ask him those prickly questions, but past that, it’s his work to do; I give him as much support as possible and the opportunities to get his work out there.”

Williams’s invitations to speak in Canada and internationally are piling up. In recent months, he has written a Globe and Mailarticle about his research, led a panel discussion in Calgary on countering Islamist extremism and will participate in another in Cambridge on Legal Harms and the New Politics of Resistance. He also had his work highlighted in a recent Calgary Heraldarticle.

With his wealth of experience from the United Kingdom, Williams says he returned to Calgary with a clearer sense of what has worked there as far as anti-terror campaigns, and what hasn’t.

“When I arrived in the United Kingdom in 2008, they were just ramping up their counter-terrorism efforts,” Williams says. “Now, in Calgary, we are in much the same place as they were then, and I hope to be able to contribute what I’ve learned, and to inform and feed into the debates here.”