RadicalizationIslamist radicals from Muslim countries tend to have engineering qualifications

Islamist radicals born and educated in Muslim countries are seventeen times more likely to have an engineering qualification than the general population in these countries.

The finding is published this week in a new book being launched at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Engineers of Jihad.

The LSE reports that the book, which relies on a study of over 800 members of violent Islamist groups, challenges a widely held view that many terrorists are “poor, ignorant and have nothing to lose,” according to its authors, LSE academic Dr. Steffen Hertog and European University Institute Professor Diego Gambetta.

“There is little doubt that violent Islamist radicals are vastly more educated than the general population born and educated in the Muslim world, and engineers are dramatically over-represented,” Hertog says.

The authors claim that the strong presence of graduates among Islamist radicals is due to economic development failures in core Muslim countries: “Ambitious young graduates, particularly engineers and to a lesser extent, newly-trained doctors, were frustrated by a lack of job opportunities when their economies turned south in the 1970s,” the authors say.

“Unlike Western-educated graduates who enjoyed good economic opportunities, their counterparts — educated in Muslim countries — were disaffected and ripe for recruitment by radical Islamic networks.”

Engineers are over-represented because they represent “the most talented and ambitious graduates at the sharp end of frustrated expectations,” the authors say.

But this is not the whole explanation. The book reveals that the over-representation of engineers extends to Islamist radicals born and bred in Asian and Western countries, where labor market opportunities have been much better than in Muslim countries. Out of seventy-one Western-based cases with known higher education credentials, 45 percent have at some point been enrolled in an engineering degree compared to 16.2 percent in the general population of Western graduates.

There is no evidence that the technical skills of engineering graduates are the reason they are so well represented among Jihadists, the authors claim.

“Bomb-making skills are not a pre-requisite in the recruiting process,” Hertog says. “An Al-Qaeda training manual instead instructs members to look for individuals who are at once inquisitive and intelligent with the ability to observe and analyze, but who are also disciplined and obedient. If anything, it is these traits that radical groups look for in engineers,” he adds.

The other striking finding in the book is that engineers are also significantly represented among far right groups, while the far left is dominated by humanities and social science graduates. This is consistent with the fact that the ideology of Islamist radicals, stripped of its religious components, overlaps far more with that of extreme right-wingers than with that of radical left-wingers, the authors argue.

The implication they draw is that the traits that make Islamism attractive to some engineers could also be the traits that make right wing extremism attractive to them. “Political psychology research links a number of personality traits to right-wing attitudes: a propensity to be easily disgusted, a desire to draw rigid social boundaries and a preference for order, structure, and certainty known as ‘need for cognitive closure’,” Hertog says. “We find that, on average, indicators for these traits are stronger among engineers compared to graduates in general, while they are weaker among students of humanities and social science.”

— Read more in Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education (Princeton University Press, 2016)