Turning to Political Violence

The Emergence of Terrorism

Marc Sageman

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780812248777, 9780812248777
• eBook ISBN: 9780812293821
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What motivates those who commit violence in the name of political beliefs? Terrorism today is not solely the preserve of Islam, nor is it a new phenomenon. It emerges from social processes and conditions common to societies throughout modern history, and the story of its origins spans centuries, encompassing numerous radical and revolutionary movements.Marc Sageman is a forensic psychiatrist and government counterterrorism consultant whose bestselling books Understanding Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad provide a detailed, damning corrective to commonplace yet simplistic notions of Islamist terrorism. In a comprehensive new book, Turning to Political Violence, Sageman examines the history and theory of political violence in the West. He excavates primary sources surrounding key instances of modern political violence, looking for patterns across a range of case studies spanning the French Revolution, through late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutionaries and anarchists in Russia and the United States, to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the start of World War I. In contrast to one-dimensional portraits of terrorist "monsters" offered by governments and media throughout history, these accounts offer complex and intricate portraits of individuals engaged in struggles with identity, injustice, and revenge who may be empowered by a sense of love and self-sacrifice.Arguing against easy assumptions that attribute terrorism to extremist ideology, and counter to mainstream academic explanations such as rational choice theory, Sageman develops a theoretical model based on the concept of social identity. His analysis focuses on the complex dynamic between the state and disaffected citizens that leads some to disillusionment and moral outrage—and a few to mass murder. Sageman's account offers a paradigm-shifting perspective on terrorism that yields counterintuitive implications for the ways liberal democracies can and should confront political violence.

Chapter 1

A Model of the Turn to Political Violence

Making Sense of Terrorism

What leads people to turn to political violence? A good starting point is to analyze how President George W. Bush mobilized Americans to fight against al Qaeda in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. On 20 September, he addressed a joint session of Congress. His eloquent and moving speech framed the American understanding and response to this form of political violence against the West for the next decade and a half.

Americans have many questions tonight. Americans are asking: Who attacked our country? The evidence . . . points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda . . . Its goal is remaking the world—and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere . . . The terrorists’ directive commands them . . . to kill all Americans, and make no distinction among military and civilians, including women and children . . . They are recruited . . . and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror. They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil . . . Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them. Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

Americans are asking, why do they hate us? . . . They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other . . .

Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command . . . to the disruption and the defeat of the global terror network . . . We will pursue nations that provide aid to or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime . . . This is not, however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom. We ask every nation to join us . . .

Americans are asking: What is expected of us? . . . I ask you to uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here. We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them . . .

Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment . . . The advance of human freedom—the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time—now depends on us. Our nation . . . will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.¹

Let us analyze how President Bush’s speech mobilized the nation to use violence against al Qaeda. He addressed the nation, and the world, as an American—“our country”—and not as an individual. As the nation came under attack, he reminded us of our common bond—our social identity as Americans—and asserted that any attack on one American, or three thousand, was an attack on all Americans. This threat to “us” made our self-conception as Americans far more relevant than our individual identities. This view of Americans-in-danger stressed our shared identity, dwarfed our individual differences, and focused us on the threat, the people who attacked us. He eloquently compared and contrasted us, freedom-loving people, from “them,” freedom-hating people. This maximized our differences from the evildoers and stressed our commonalities as Americans. He simplified the terrorists’ essence to that of indiscriminate murderers whose intolerance betrayed their religion. He then went on to draw sharp boundaries between us and our allies, and them and their allies: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Given the proximity of the 9/11 tragedy, this definition of the situation resonated with most Americans.

Indeed, as the leader of the country, President Bush had to help the nation make sense of these extraordinary, puzzling, and threatening events and provide guidance for the rest of us about how to think, feel, and act in this situation. His repeated phrase “Americans are asking” was followed by explanations and guidance. This set up expectations for thoughts, feelings, and behavior as Americans especially with respect to these terrorist outsiders. Through a shared social identity as Americans or Westerners, he set the tone for mobilization of Americans to fight the threat. This sense of shared social identity as non-terrorists included our allies in this fight² and formed the basis of collective action against terrorists. By this stress on the virtuous “us,” “who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom,” President Bush reached out and extended his in-group to include the rest of the world that he hoped to mobilize in a “global” war against terrorism. Getting people to feel engaged in the post-9/11 events, to feel outrage at the perpetrators as if they had been attacked themselves, was the necessary condition for counterterrorism, or the fight against “them.”

With his speech, President Bush became the prototypical in-group member, providing guidance to the appropriate feelings, thoughts, values, and behaviors we should adopt as Americans vis-à-vis terrorists. His fondness for Texan boots, jeans, and leather jackets and his malapropisms only enhanced his image as the prototypical American. The day after the speech, the vast majority of Americans (78 percent) felt that the president did a good job explaining the goals of any military action that might result as a part of the war of terror.³ By crafting this sense of shared social identity in a project to fight terrorists, he mobilized the country for war. President Bush’s approval rating soared to a record 90 percent the day after the speech, according to a poll conducted by CNN/USA Today/Gallup.⁴ His high approval rating was partly due to the fact that he had captured the mood of the country and moved to where it wanted to go. Fully 75 percent approved of his proposed military response, and an additional 19 percent complained that it was not enough. A week before the speech, 88 percent of Americans already thought that the country should take military action in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. With this speech, Bush jumped into the locomotive of a moving train. The nation looked to him for leadership and internalized his sense of shared social identity and norms. He did not have to order Americans to join the national security apparatus; there was no need for coercion or material incentives. Tens of thousands volunteered and became soldiers in the fight against al Qaeda.

This process of mobilizing Americans to fight al Qaeda is similar to that of turning to political violence for those who are now called terrorists. A political community, in an escalating conflict with an outside group, disillusioned with peaceful means of solving the conflict and outraged by this group’s unwarranted aggression, will generate volunteers, who view themselves as soldiers, to defend it against this outside group. Although this book deals with what is usually called “radicalization,” or the process of becoming a “terrorist,” both terms are so full of embedded assumptions that it is necessary to first deconstruct them by laying a foundation of a perspective or paradigm⁵ of political behavior before defining them. Likewise, the turn to political violence can only be understood within this paradigm, which frames the model presented in this book. This paradigm implies some counterintuitive findings that otherwise defy explanation.

A Social Identity Perspective of Political Violence

According to this paradigm, all attempts to understand the social world start with an automatic and natural cognitive process of self-categorization. My analysis of President Bush’s mobilization of Americans to fight al Qaeda shows that self-categorization was the basis of Americans’ understanding of themselves and their enemies. Self-categorization is the core concept of a social science project analyzing the behavior of groups, known as the social identity perspective (SIP).⁶ This perspective allows us to transcend the intuitive but unexamined and erroneous assumptions guiding our understanding of how people become terrorists, which have resulted in stagnation in terrorism research.⁷

The most popular explanation for “radicalization into terrorism”⁸ is that future terrorists are predisposed to carry out terrorist operations because of some personal characteristics.⁹ While a few people still believe that terrorists are insane,¹⁰ most laypersons believe that they are “true believers”¹¹ guided by wrong ideas. This view that they are fanatics driven by ideology is the ideological perspective. As the president’s speech suggested, they are seen as naïve, vulnerable, or “at-risk” young people spotted at home and developed by recruiters, who indoctrinate them and send them to terrorist camps abroad. Once their brainwashing and tactical instruction are completed, they are ordered back home to carry out mayhem. This view implies a theory of social influence to explain the acquisition of novel ideas so strong that one is willing to sacrifice oneself and kill others for them. One of the most common of such theories postulates that people are rational actors whose behavior is the observable result of cost/benefit calculations according to a predetermined set of preferences.¹² This is the rational choice theory (RCT), whose simple assumptions allow scientists to precisely calculate probabilities of choices and predict behavior. This perspective, which has been one of the most fruitful paradigms in the social sciences,¹³ provides a simple explanation for the adoption of a new ideology as the result of indoctrination that selectively rewards its acceptance (through the provision of love and inclusion in a desirable group) and punishes its rejection (through ostracism or retribution). This study will frequently compare the social identity perspective, ideological, and rational choice theory paradigms as suitable explanations at key milestones in the turn to political violence in the empirical chapters that follow.

In contrast, when perpetrators of political violence are asked to explain their use of violence, they blame it on grievances. However, this answer quickly fails to satisfy because the same grievances are shared by a huge number of people, yet only a few turn to violence. When probed deeper, they blame circumstances.¹⁴ These explanations stress the doubt and uncertainty they felt when they had to choose among several alternatives in a complex and confusing situation. Their explanations clash with the linear and simplistic determinism of analysts who never participated in these events.¹⁵ The certainty and linearity of pundits come only retrospectively, when the complexity of circumstances can be reduced to an abstraction of what we know post hoc to be the significant factors. This ignores the considerable trouble actors have at the time detecting true signals from noise. This popular analysis focuses on a person’s decision making to explain behavior. In fact, modern Western culture favors this lay explanation of behavior with its elaborate causal vocabulary of how mental states, especially emotions, lead to certain actions. In contrast, there is an absence of an equivalent lexicon of situations leading to specific behavior, with the exception of threats, experienced as fears.

Before dismissing perpetrators’ explanations of their behavior as merely exculpatory justification for their crimes, let the reader consider the robust evidence that circumstances exert strong pressure, or force, on people to behave in a certain way. The French capture this sense of being compelled by circumstances by calling it la force des choses, literally the force of things, which is an ambiguous expression lumping together grievances, static circumstances, and the dynamics of events. The static dimension captures the structural context of events and includes the opportunity structure to use violence.¹⁶ As events unfold in a certain way, the dynamic dimension suggests that the evolution of circumstances favors some actions over others at a given time.

When experts are asked about reasons for the turn to political violence, some continue to use pathological psychological explanations¹⁷ or cite frustration from relative deprivation.¹⁸ Most, however, point to classical social psychological experiments dealing with conformity,¹⁹ obedience to authority,²⁰ and the power of assigned roles.²¹ These experiments reveal the power of situations—la force des choses—to dramatically affect behavior without the actor even being aware of subtle experimental manipulations of the environment,²² which show that randomly chosen experimental subjects are willing to kill others in the name of science or to sadistically torture prisoners. A few scholars have used these insights as building blocks for an explanation of radicalization.²³ However, these experiments, whose findings are robust and have been duplicated, have long lacked an adequate theoretical explanation. Recently, the SIP has provided this explanation.²⁴ In the rest of this chapter, I describe this perspective and its relevance to understanding the turn to political violence. I do not suggest that the SIP is the only explanation for this process, but it is probably its most significant one.

Like many other developments in social psychology, the social identity perspective began as an attempt to understand catastrophic events like the Holocaust.²⁵ The SIP comes from the work of Henri Tajfel, a Polish Jew who had immigrated to France and joined the French army to fight the Nazis. He was captured and survived a series of prisoner of war camps in Germany. After his liberation, he dedicated his life to studying what had made the Holocaust possible.

In order to find out the minimal elements that led to prejudice and intergroup conflict, Tajfel randomly assigned subjects to arbitrary groups (of which in fact they were the only member) and found that this assignment was enough to generate in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination. This group bias involved identification with one’s group or, as his student John Turner would later argue, self-categorization. These minimal group conditions showed that loners spontaneously acted out on behalf of a group with which they had no contact.²⁶ Political examples of such loners acting out on behalf of a group because they imagine themselves to be one of its members are lone terrorists committing acts of violence on behalf of a larger social category: “jihadis,” “anarchists,” “liberators,” “defenders of the constitution,” “defenders of unborn babies,” or any member of a vanguard striking out against the public in the name of some virtue. These loners do not require a special explanation for their violence and do not warrant a special label, like lone wolf. In fact, the empirical chapters show that a large number of politically violent people in history were loners.

Tajfel’s minimal group experiments imply that people categorize themselves into different groups and this simple process of categorization leads to prejudice, group bias,²⁷ and is the key to understanding collective behavior, including social movements,²⁸ terrorism, and counterterrorism. Self-categorization, or the acquisition of a shared social identity, is what makes collective behavior possible. Categorization is a quick, natural, associative, emotional, effortless, and automatic process of simplifying our environment in order to make sense of it by creating categories of objects sorted out on the basis of apparently common attributes.²⁹ In terrorism research, this process centers on the categorization of terrorists in contrast to ourselves, as Bush did in his speech.

Bush mobilized the country by crafting a common sense of identity for his audience: American. This category made them all the same when compared with the salient out-group, the terrorists, and by portraying the war on terrorism as a defense of American virtues, values, and priorities threatened by this out-group. With his rhetorical skills, Bush answered key questions on Americans’ minds: “Who attacked our country?” “Why do they hate us?” “How will we fight and win this war?” “What is expected of us?” Through his guidance, he generated the appropriate norms for Americans, our common in-group, and positioned himself as its prototype for others to follow or emulate. His arguments resonated strongly with Americans, and through them he became the true leader of the nation, as illustrated by his dramatic approval rating.

Through his address, Bush became the uncontested leader of the fight against terrorism. First, he consistently used language that showed that he was not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. A Model of the Turn to Political Violence
• 2. The French Revolution and the Emergence of Modern Political Violence
• 3. Political Violence from the Restoration to the Paris Commune
• 4. The Professionalization of Terroristic Violence in Russia
• 5. Anarchism and the Expansion of Political Violence
• 6. The Specialized Terrorist Organization: The PSR Combat Unit 1902–1908
• 7. Banditry, the End of a World, and Indiscriminate Political Violence
• 8. Policy Implications
• Appendix. Testing the Social Identity Perspective Model of the Turn to Political Violence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments