Preventing political violence

My problem with the second of my lunch time events yesterday at Brookings, “Defusing the Bomb:  Reversing the Process of Radicalization and Preventing Political Violence,” was not so much what was said but the need to continue saying it.  The study, undertaken for the Qatar International Academy for Security Studies by the Soufan Group (as in Ali Soufan, formerly of the FBI), looked at strategic counter-terrorism approaches in France, Indonesia, Northern Ireland, Singapore and Great Britain.

While none of the programs “had systematic ‘outcome’ data that could be used to evaluate them,” the takeaway was clear enough:  comprehensive (psychological, social, religious) community-based approaches that rely on former militants work better than law enforcement alone, especially if the law enforcement is not of the community policing variety.  The French approach was the exemplar in this study.

Why?  Because it is not really about theology or ideology.  Recruitment is about identity and relies for its effectiveness on finding (mostly) young people who feel stereotyped, marginalized, misunderstood and unfairly stigmatized.  Countering this requires offering a new narrative that enables people to re-engage their critical thinking skills and disengage from a narrative that they have found highly compelling in the past.

The process of recruitment is similar to recruitment into gangs in the U.S.–no one yesterday was parepared to say exactly how it differs.  Of course we have largely failed to prevent gang recruitment, and the prospects for preventing radicalization don’t seem much better, at least in the U.S.  Singapore has powers to detain and treat that don’t exist here, and it is difficult, especially at the local level, for the U.S. to mobilize the kind of comprehensive approach that even the UK and Indonesia are able to mount. Particularly notable in Indonesia is the individual and respectful treatment of detainees, which the Indonesians believe elicits more and more reliable intelligence information.

That said, it seems to me more than time that we start to do what Soufan Group, Quilliam Foundation and others suggest:  engage in a comprehensive way, preferably using at least in part former radicals, with people and communities for whom political violence is a way of asserting identity with a bang.  This will not be easy either at home or abroad, but it is what is needed to reduce a threat against which military force has proven ineffective and law enforcement is essential but not sufficient.