From a review of Scott Atran's 'Talking to the Enemy'

I'm still in the middle of reading this book but thought I'd post a few things from a review in the guardian:

"Scott Atran, an American anthropologist, believes he has some of the answers. Terrorists, he tells us, are social beings influenced by social connections and values familiar to all of us. They are members of school clubs, sports teams or community organisations; they are proud fathers and difficult teenagers. They do not, Atran maintains, die for a cause; they die for each other.

...

Similar thinking came from Marc Sageman, a clinical psychologist and former CIA officer, who argued provocatively that "jihad" was leaderless. For all these analysts, it was the process of radicalisation itself that was important. Terrorists are not mad – there is no evidence of higher levels of psychological illness among them – nor poor – the link with poverty is indirect, if there is one at all – nor do they necessarily feel humiliated. Atran draws on his own research to show how personal humiliation, such as that suffered daily by Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints, in fact decreases the likelihood that any individual will act violently. On the other hand, the perception that others with whom one feels a common bond are being humiliated can be a powerful driver for action, Atran says. It is in the existence of a sense of community, whether that be a group of local friends or the ummah (the global nation of Muslim believers), that he believes the roots of violence can be found.

Atran deploys his formidable knowledge of social anthropology to dissect the various dynamics that have helped form human individuals into groups, warbands, hunting parties or armies over the millennia. Although this historical background is mostly fascinating, even more impressive is Atran's field research, in places ranging from Palestine and Spain to Tétouan in northern Morocco and remote Indonesian islands. It is this research that underpins his vision of radical Islamic militancy as an adaptive social movement. The 2002 Bali bombs, he writes, "were largely planned and executed through local networks of friends, of kin, neighbours and schoolmates who radicalised one another until all were eager and able to kill perfect strangers for an abstract cause". Terrorist networks, he points out, are "generally no different than the ordinary kinds of social networks that guide people's career paths. It's the terrorist career itself that is the most remarkable, not the mostly normal individuals who become terrorists."

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Atran lists four key elements of the "organised anarchy" that he suggests typifies modern violent Islamic activism: goals are constantly ambiguous and inconsistent; modes of action are decided pragmatically on the basis of trial and error or based on the residue of learning from accidents of past experience; the boundaries of the group constantly change; and the degree of involvement of members varies over time. The result is not a hierarchic, centrally commanded terrorist organisation but a decentralised and constantly evolving network based on contingent adaptations to unpredictable events."

read the rest here


Atran responds to a review by Jeremy Harding:

In his review of my book, Talking to the Enemy, Jeremy Harding states that by informing the US authorities of my meeting with Ramadan Shallah, general secretary of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in Damascus in December 2009 , I became ‘a no-nonsense telltale’, but that ‘being a bit of an insider, [I] perhaps didn’t qualify for the reward money’ (LRB, 17 February). Harding further implies that my talks with jihadis were undertaken at the behest of the US government.

For the most part, my talks with political leaders were self-financed. In the case of Syria, the World Federation of Scientists was invited by the government of Syria to discuss scientific initiatives in the region, including political barriers to such initiatives. Meetings were arranged with several leading political personalities through the offices of the president and foreign minister of Syria. The meeting with Shallah came as a surprise to us. When I checked on the internet and found that he was on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists, I and another American in the WFS delegation were obliged under US law to inform the US government of our meeting. Not to have done so could have meant prosecution, and an end to years of multidisciplinary, multinational research. The contents of the meeting were made public, with the approval of Shallah, who indicated that all of his remarks were on the record. At no time did we pass on any information concerning Shallah’s whereabouts or anything else that did not pertain to the content of our talks.

We were given US government funding exclusively for theoretical studies (surveys, interviews, experiments) concerning the limits of rational choice and the role of sacred or transcendent values in encouraging or discouraging political violence. The results of these studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Proceedings of the Royal Society – B.

The ‘support from the US air force, navy and army research offices’ that Harding cites involved only so-called ‘6.1 level funding’ (for peer-reviewed theoretical research). The Army Research Office and Office of Naval Research follow many of the same academic guidelines as the National Science Foundation (our main source of funding), including rigorous oversight by universities and host countries on protection of human subjects. This is done regardless of the researchers’ political persuasion or support for US defence policies. For example, ONR has long supported Noam Chomsky’s work in theoretical linguistics without regard to his concerted criticism of the US defence establishment.