Sharper focus on the young could help combat terrorism: Experts
learning the nuances of words and social connections needed to enlist followers.
Research and funding to understand terrorism needs to extend beyond the “sporadic involvement” of researchers from the top universities to become a coordinated multinational, interdisciplinary effort, says the paper. Field interviews with militants, country surveys and psychological experiments have to be more joined up, and big data analyses will need to be informed by theory and field experience to pinpoint connections that are truly significant and meaningful, says the paper.
The independence of the scientists involved is paramount, argues the paper. “Unless government maintains proper distance, it will deter scientists ready to build knowledge to contain terrorism but who fear wasting time or compromising their integrity,” it concludes.
Another problem highlighted is a lack of proper US funding for research into disciplines that could be harnessed to bring together diverse data and develop algorithms for big data-driven work. The U.S. Department of Defense has provided no more than 2% of its annual $5-6 billion budget for science and engineering research, and just 6 percent of $16 billion for basic research for psychology and social sciences research in 2016, says the paper. Although the White House set up a federal program for countering violent extremism in 2015, this unit ‘currently lacks the mechanisms and funding’, says the paper. It highlights a need for theoretical and field knowledge to create ‘culturally sensitive’ training data; and researchers have to be alert to any changes in terrorists’ behavior that could undermine archived observations.
Professor Atran comments: ‘To be more successful in combating terrorism, governments should look at how they can build research capacity that is properly funded, independent of governmental interference, and grounded in systematic data collection, checking and analyses that is devoid of politics.’
The paper notes that previous research has suggested that nearly three-quarters of those who join Islamic State or Al Qaeda do so in groups, and these are often pre-existing social networks and typically cluster in particular towns and neighborhoods. Although recruitment to ISIS occurs more to direct personal appeals by organizational agents or individual exposure to social media, than previously was the case with Al Qaeda, this clustered rather than dispersed pattern of recruitment through pre-pre-existing social networks suggests that counter-radicalization and prevention policies need to focus less on individual personalities and more on whole group dynamics.
“There is also a need to improve our understanding of how young people become radicalized and what we can do to prevent it. Theories about ‘root causes’ have concentrated on factors such as an individual’s social and economic circumstances, and these are not nuanced enough. Recent research has shown social networking is important for the growth in size and scope of terrorist groups. Epidemiological models that have more commonly been used in public health studies could be deployed – of how radical ideas move through host populations — rather than relying on a strictly criminal approach to look at violent extremism.”
— Read more in Scott Atran et al., “Challenges in researching terrorism from the field,” Science 355, no. 6323 (27 January 20170): 352-54 (DOI: 10.1126/science.aaj2037)
