 Hello Welcome to new America. I'm David Sturman a policy analyst with the international security program here Today we have dr. Mark Sageman who has been working on terrorism issues for a long time one of the foundational voices in the field I won't say much more other than he's worked with the intelligence community law enforcement and defense attorneys on this issue one of the more Or most well-rounded people to work on the subject and with that I turn it over To our guests Thank you, I'm Honored to be here to really give this talk to you. I must admit that In a way, there is some deception involved. I'm not really going to talk about becoming a terrorist I'm going to talk about political violence But people don't really understand what violence is and so terrorism is actually a Part of political violence. So how do we understand why people do this and That's been the focus of my work for the last 40 years. I should say so I've been working as you heard within the government until about four years ago and This four-year gap since I stopped allowed me to to think and To take a step back and to try to understand what I had been doing for 30 years It's actually very hard to do things and and understand things at the same time and as a physician you understand that you can't really just wait there and Let people bleed you have to do something and then you try to figure out what you've been doing to see if it's good or bad Well the problem about you know looking at terrorism and political violence is that very few people and very few scholars have been terrorists and This is a huge huge problem because we tend to define ourselves in contrast to what we call terrorist and We view them through this prism so that means that What we think about as terrorists are really simply stereotypes of what we are not and They become almost a mirror of our own biases towards outsiders So instead of trying to understand them We really treat them as outsiders and we focus on the person and not the context And this is what psychologists called the fundamental era of attribution We assign to them stable characteristic that predispose them to violence. So either the criminals Well, it turns out that all empirical studies that Show that very few of them have been criminals at first although things are changing simply because the longer you have a wave of political violence You have a degradation over time Where you know at first the people are engaged in political violence at the beginning of this wave I usually the elite of a country and at the end it used to you know, they tend to be People who are down and out So in terms of another potential stable characteristic is Mental illness. Well, we haven't found any terrorist personality the most common Explanation we have is that they do this because of their ideas. We have this overcognitive view of terrorists They we call that their ideology the narrative on its extremism and the problem is that nobody has is born as a terrorist and so How do they acquire this idea some people say well, there's a process of socialization and indoctrination brainwashing suggestion which is hypnosis but The problem is that we really haven't seen it Empirically so people say well, you know, how about exposing themselves to those ideas and people who have like a weak personality You have vulnerable to it. They just adopted and we know that this is not true. Most people reject those ideas when first When they first encounter it is no forced socialization that we can see and definitely not on the internet So this idea is that People who are susceptible to it have like some personal weaknesses Vulnerable the naive the at risk if we're disposed but it you know, this is easy to Believe as long as you don't really talk to a real terrorist Once you talk to them you realize now Definitely is not the case And any ideology can lead to violence another way of looking at this problem is a Rational choice theory namely that they behavior is due to in political violence sacrifice themselves for a group and You know suicide terrorism for instance, which is the extreme version of this is not compatible with self-interest If you think about it So why do people do this so another way for I try to count search for data to really try to capture and understand The the person's perspective The terrorist perspectives I've done about 30 personal interviews of violent perpetrators not People who know them not people who preach violence actual perpetrators people who have blood on their hand and I do that because of my legal work but I've done that also for the intelligence community and You know, it can't really take what people tell you at face value need Corroboration and I usually have access to all kinds of discovery material the problem is all of that is classified I cannot publish it So what I did is that I search for similar data in history and I kind of looked at about 34 campaigns of political violence But people called terrorism and it spends four continent two hundred and thirty years mostly in the West because that's where you have adequate data And this can attract My findings with the 30 interviews that I've done with what I call global and your jihadis and You know that you realize in terms of the ideology or the reason they're doing it as many many causes as Republicanism independence royalism, you know ethnic reasons Anarchism socialism communism and religious In all religion including Buddhists who are the most non-violent, but yeah, Buddhist ever I'm Shin Rikkyo, you know, that's a Buddhist so and they use multiple tactics mob assassination bombing and One thing that I discovered just as I talked to people Is that perpetrators were willing to talk and they often use a childhood propaganda so you actually can get their point of view through Through what they say so What's what's your point of view the view from the inside is simple they can have first Sorry Yeah, they first blame it on grievances, but you know too many people share all those grievances Very few turn violent so they blame the circumstance, you know, they just retaliate against You know a group attacks and so you really can't get a feeling that their answer is very much contextual the reason they turn violent it's because of their circumstances environment the context and they Interpret this context through the prism of the social identity who they are they act up norms values meanings and The various interpretation of their groups about the social world the internet of course exacerbates this phenomenon because he becomes an Echo chamber of their own biases. So what you realize is that? Turning to political violence not pretty term in only very few turn violent This their version of things captured a doubt in this and their Insecurity at the time of their turning violent They don't really know they're trying to understand and nevertheless is still very committed and their answers are very strongly supported by Empirical evidence and what we found in the social sciences in the last half century The purpose of their acts give meaning to these acts. So let me come Try to You know combine those two perspectives and give you a new paradigm to Think about this phenomenon of terrorism and political violence It's based on the notion. Can you read that actually? This is really very it's very small. Yeah Well, let me tell you it's basically about self categorization. Who do you think you are? And this is a very natural phenomenon. It's quick natural. It's associative It has a lot of associative idea in this emotional. It's a fortless. It's an automatic process Just like tenement Daniel Kahneman described in the system one This is what we do because we are human beings and he comes from its salience within a given context so our identity could be based on race religion gender occupation nation political group and the specific Social identity that we think we are Depends on what's called the meta-contrast principle the availability of this category in your mind and the fitness to the Social context you're in so those categories are not fixed and not absolute Properties of the categorizer, but they're relative and fluid and they always in contrast to an outgroup that helps define your in-group And they shift from individual to Social identification is very strong implication. It makes collective behavior possible You trust respect and cooperate with other in-group members. You seek out agreement You coordinate with them you give them help you develop the feeling of group belonging you view the group favorably So you have an in-group bias and you have an outgroup prejudice. It's part of human nature and One is just a member of this imagined community. You're just a part of this team. You're not an individual It's like you know if you know if you play sports team sports, you're just a member It's not about your individual statistics whether your team wins or loses So there's a process of depersonalization and for the outgroup you just view them as stereotypes of who we are not so in a sense you dehumanize and this is a natural process and You engage in group activities For group and not personal motives Okay, so now I give you that's that's a theory. It's a robust theory. It's called Self-categorization theory. How does that apply to political violence? The first step in Political violence is an activation of this politicized social identity You have some grievances that divides people into two contrasting sides and the state intervention politicizes them Over last two centuries a very common Grievance was bad food and bad teaching You often have students starting to protest You know the bad food into cafeteria a terrible teaching and the dean panics calls the cops and they beat up the students Now the bad teaching that food irrelevant. It's a cup beating them. That's relevant This is the activation of what I call the political social identity. This is what kill the czar in 1881 This is really what happened in the 1960s in In this country you have students very much becoming politicized for whatever reason and they create This imagined political protest community, which is really simply the collection of people sharing the same politicized social identity mass media of course now facilitates identification with small bizarre and foreign groups and You have a spectrum of commitment and membership could be individual it could be small groups could be larger groups Organization that's part of this political protest community. This community does not form spontaneously it's often Created through the intense efforts of organized and Ideologues people drift in and out of this community. It's really amorphous. It's fluid. It has fuzzy porous boundaries I used to call it a social blob. It was my blood theory before Over time this discursive community Involves into a counterculture because it defines itself against society it becomes a counterculture It becomes a lifestyle, you know people Have symbols and manners of speaking the shares same symbol this shared ways of thinking and feelings and behaving towards the world Common rituals preferred references and standards Preferred dress codes diets, you know people who have lived through the 60s know exactly what I'm talking about with the hippies and so on now you have You know Salafi Muslims community that that really do that and This theory also implies a theory of social influence So how do you know how to behave and what to do well? You can look at the best Example of your group and you try to imitate that person. That's really simple You know if you are a hippie you can look at the best hippie around and say I'm going to come Do what he does so the best example the most representative of in group and most different from the out group They become a source of imitation their action feelings and ideas Shape the group norms. So people join them through the Their attraction to this prototype. It's not through coercion or active recruitment and people want to be Part of the group and they want to do what the group would like them to do because it is who they are a Very good example of this are soldiers You know soldiers basically Want to act like soldiers because they are soldiers and Unfortunately soldiers also kill they kill for the nation, but that's they don't need any justification. That's who they are That's what they've been trained to do and That's who they think I'm doing so this discount political violence is only in the context of an escalation of conflict between two groups And the study of political violence must analyze this interaction of the two group It cannot just focus on one group. You cannot describe a boxing game with just one boxer, you know, the guy can Waves his arms and then falls down and you know, nobody really understands was because he's been hit by the other guy You have to describe the other guy You cannot understand what happened to al-qaeda for instance without understanding what we did to them You know, it basically decimated them, you know, there's still a small pocket that exists in Afghanistan and Pakistan and a little bit in Syria, but you know, it's not the al-qaeda of 2001 and it's not because al-qaeda decided to Fold in a sense of disperse. It's because of what we did to them. You have to describe the interaction of the two Religion group and so this leads to a self reflexive definition of terrorism Terrorism is just the categorization of our group political violence in domestic peace time And now you understand this conundrum that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter Well, they're part of your group. They are freedom fighters. If they're part of the other group, they are terrorist It's the same people You know, it's a you cannot define them outside of who does it defining and the state contribute to the emergence of violence and that's missing from the literature because scholars identify with the state and So they tend to overlook the on contribution to this conflict and as any group conflict escalates you have a Shift to the extremity more militant people within the in group become prototype They seen as more representative they generate group norms and the group becomes more militant They ignore they own group violence and blaming all on the odd group. It's unprovoked attacks. Well, no, no, it was always Between the two people say, oh, well 9-11 was unprovoked. No, it wasn't It was already about, you know, 10 years of Conflict between the people who became al-Qaeda and the United States I mean when people, you know, I'm a that I really can't talked about, you know The hundreds of thousands of people of children in Iraq were starving because of the U.S. And Bargo and so on. They actually see this as As a conflict we tend not to see it as a conflict because I you know It's an unprovoked attack. They think the same way about us So each group believes that the most extremist odd group voice is the most representative of that odd group they ignore they own extremist speech and just You know the council are look at that, you know, this is just the odd group There's a most essentialist, you know fanatic and we have to exterminate them now I mean any group has really a continuum of voices in it and You you cannot ignore the odd group majority moderate voices So you have a rhetorical escalation also between the two group. It's called the cumulative radicalization of discourse You start if you use extreme concepts such as war metaphors Well, that often leads to extreme solution and that decreases threshold of violence the point here It's not the violent ideology per se, but the violence and extremists of the speech That's important and that's really one of the key elements and of course All of this is egged down by social media, which is not conducive to thoughtful calm analysis to solve any problems So that that's one condition the first condition under which people who have a politicized social identity become violent the second condition is I'm sorry disillusionment with legal redress of The agreevencies so if you have ineffective protest people either Leave the group that's ineffective They voice a displeasure at the group of the effectiveness and a few people will escalate and this is media by the strength of Group identity their loyalty to the group most people just live political protest community when they realize it's pointless It's hopeless some complained give voice, but which time they also leave and say well lead us talk talk talk and nothing happened Very few the most dedicated a loyal will will redouble their efforts to redress the grievance and Political violence, you know under this perspective This explains why political violence erupts at the tail end of legal political protest campaign and This has been established fairly strongly over over time the third The third condition that transform a politicized social identity Into political violence is this more moral outrage at out group aggression You have unexpected a courageous act of out group aggression against the in group If you an in group member you feel an attack on one person in the out group is an attack on all but if you an Out group member, you know, and you are part of the group that did the attack is that oh my god We didn't mean it. This is just collateral damage Well, if you remember of the group, you know where your parents are being killed you don't think that's so likely This is you know, and you you assume intentionality of so you can see that How the same event can be seen through the prism of one social identity completely opposite And so you have this escalation the fair killing of an in-group member just leads to that person being a hero and You had that yesterday in the president's speech when he had this Tim six guy What was his name? Yeah, Ryan Owens. Well, he called him a hero and This is you know, very much if a member of your group like a soldier dies in battle. He's a hero, but if you have a Person you're in group is totally innocent. He's not a soldier and he was killed unfairly. He becomes a martyr And that's really very very different So whatever you hear like the martyrdom and so on about al-qaeda and so on they talk about heroes They're not talking about martyrs martyrs are people who have been martyrs other people are killed by barrel bombs in Syria, you know the innocent civilians and Both heroes and martyrs become prototypes loss of emulation But the martyrs death is a little different because it cries out for revenge so again that was again the threshold for violence other type of Out-group aggression a threat to white part of group unfair state punishment against members one group Recruitment of traders trying to undermine one's group insult against symbols of one's group identity such as cartoon of the prophet and people say enough is enough the group needs to defend itself against the out group and So what you have the second step is this activation of a martial social identity? You think a few people volunteer to become soldiers to defend one's imagined community against Those out group attacks most of the time they just drift into this world You know they become soldiers and killing is what they do the process may be short or it may be long they know real stages And You start to act out your new social identity. You can start doing paramilitary activities Sometimes even dress, you know and camouflage outfits and this reinforce your social identity Loners are no different They are part of this larger imagined community social community And they don't warrant the special label remember. It's an imagined community You don't really need face-to-face links to them and you're willing to sacrifice yourself for your comrades You're in group and occurs and gradually you isolate yourself from other non-violent members of this political protest community because you're simply more comfortable with like-minded companions and and other people in the larger political protest community avoid the people who decide to become violent because they don't want to get in trouble and Gradually the people who are violent they redraw the boundary of their out group to include society and their former comrades And they become legitimate targets of violence The people who are violent they feel special they feel different from the larger political protest community They're the vanguard of the revolution the the vanguard of Jihad the vanguard, you know, whatever term that you put in and They feel like creating history and there's a very strong spirit of core among them, which is forged through adversity so once the threshold is Crust you you have what I call the dynamics of violence You have the emergence of a bunch of violent guys from the bottom up It's a self-selection and therefore it's very difficult to detect From the larger political protest community before they act violent People always look for a profile. This certainly is a profile But it's not the profile that you think because it's a subjective profile. Those people think they are soldiers Protecting and defending their community. It's a subjective profile not an objective one. Everybody can identify with you know victims of You know their group and you can be rich you can be poor you can be a gangster you can be a Virtuous person anybody can identify looking at social economic Factors will not get you there So the the bunch of violent guys are inherently unstable Usually it is not top-down authority to resolve inevitable dispute personality conflicts among rival often masquerade as ideological conflict you have many splinters The way we tell the story of those groups the linearity is really an artifact of retrospective writing We know the end and therefore, you know, we can't look for a linear story, but actually the story is not linear It's very confusing You know, you it'd be very hard to anticipate who becomes violent There's constant discussion. That's why it's a discursive community members egging each other on all the time Within the group who becomes violent is an active core that initiate and drive violent plots That's the associates who basically tag along and there are peripherals. You know something about it But they don't really want to get involved Newcomers just volunteer from the larger political protest community Attracted by the active core the new prototypes of the active core. You don't really have real recruitment Active participation is not static The membership of the violent people the violent small violent groups is very fluid and You know as you travel along this path to violence you have intense time commitment Which means that it's more likely to happen in Life transition when you're a student when you're unemployed When you're a peddler, it's very rarely does it happen in career of family people because if your Spouse is not part of the political protest community you have very quickly to decide between your spouse and between the community and More often than not your spouse will win or otherwise you get rid of your spouse and You you get full-time into that community You have intense social bonds forged in adversity have a lot of sexual Promiscuity within those groups, which is and this dates back to the French Revolution. I mean right now. We are very sexually permissive society But you know you go back to you know the French Revolution and the 1840s. I mean the Russians who killed the the Tsar in 1881, you know, they were just You know hopping around just like sexual musical chairs the same thing, you know in weathermen Except the weathermen were a little bit different because usually the top dog is a man and He has this whole harem of women, you know ready to be To give themselves up to him the weathermen was different Bernardine Dawn was a top, you know, she was like the queen bee and she had a whole You know slew of male companion glass being Bill Ayers now But you can see that it's so it's not really gender specific Although it's much more likely to be a man to be the top dog, but it can happen to be a woman and any attempt to Within the group now the group of violent people any attempt to even try to understand the art group is felt like a betrayal Whose side are you on? I mean, that's usually the the question that people will ask you so From the small beginnings you evolved into campaigns of political violence Most of the time the first attack is the last one people are killed or captured And it progressively becomes more and more violent because Leaders must fend off more radical rivals and keep up the morale of you know They violent troops to prevent them from exiting so you need to carry it violent You can have stuck in this cycle violence bring similar shift of extremity on both sides So state agent like policemen They now don't think of themselves as policemen. They think of themselves as a ventures of the victims of 9 11 You can see that, you know, you have this radicalization both sides they're no longer guardians of the peace and you start developing this cult of violence where You legitimize all means to achieve your goals Torture in discriminate killing everything you can see how this sinks very quickly and People who are violent have the subsection of carrying out the violent mission at all costs So even though things it may not You know make sense politically to carry out these violence They they you know, they set themselves on this gold and they're going to carry it out, which is often why the violence stops after You know a spectacular things for instance the Finians The Irish people who had this campaign of bombings in London between 1881 1885 can't stop after the bombing of Parliament and the Tower of London something really spectacular And the completion of the spectacular operation often turns out this obsession doesn't turn off the vines completely But with that specific mission that they have and it's pretty car on both sides Trump's abstract political goals, so you see over time it degenerates into pure bendy tree forget about the political You know goals that you had at first, you know your Loyalty to the group trumps everything and state Repression drives all violent suspect on the ground so it may inadvertently increase the bunch of violent guys because The guys who were before in the political protest community could go back and forth to real life But now if they are Declared outlaws they cannot do that and that's in life now as your cognitive horizon You become obsessed with your enemy you harden your beliefs you overestimate your popularity because at that time You're completely detached from the rest of your even former companion who actually could even criticize you So the bunch of violent guys now appear irrational because of the opacity of their beliefs They look fanatical because of the strength of their beliefs and they look like they rigid You know they resist to any kind of outside argument So what we're doing here is that we reduce complex group dynamics to personality characteristic pathological hatred and With time you have the transformation of the surviving bunch of violent guys Because of you know the pressure put on them into hierarchical secure secret and discipline organization This only happens with time so Basically what I've told you is Really a new paradigm to think about this political violence as a compressive comprehensive theory of political violence You have the activation of a politicized social identity which Becomes this imagined political protest community. It's still nonviolent But under the three condition I enumerated namely the escalation of conflict with the states including the cumulative Radicalization of discourse, you know the extreme speech not the ideology second the disillusionment with legal means of redress and Perceputated by moral outrage that perceived a grievous outgroup aggression Leads a few to activate in themselves think of themselves as soldiers and martial social identity to protect their Endangered community which then leads to violence This model has very strong support from the 34 campaigns of political violence that I've looked at Where is maybe to exception? That's because there were cults that became violent like I'm Shinrikyo and the Russian issues Which is kind of very interesting In political violence Identity trumps ideology and self-interest you'd have no violent radicalization without identification Political violence is first and foremost political, you know, I'm going back and forth to France You know talking with French scholars French government official and so on and they tend to look at this Political violence as a psychological phenomenon, you know, so if they actually talk to those guys They have social workers. They have, you know, and it's like no, there's no criminal Psychological ideological predisposition. It's a political act. You have to face it as a political In its political dimension, they never want to talk about that governments don't want to talk about that there's a paradox in political violence because Even though originally the violence is to protect your community and to bring attention to the grievances namely the state killing your community The audience pays no attention to the purpose of the violence. It's only focuses on The violence it focuses exclusively so you become Decontextualized and then people say well, I can't understand them. Why do they do that? and Unfortunately, what I'm trying to tell you that political violence is a consequence of human nature It's not an aberration and it requires constant vigilance to prevent our natural tendency to divide the world into us and them Which is a natural tendency from escalating into conflict and violence so Let me finish by telling you what that means in the present context in Al-Qaeda Daesh and also in terms of our counter insurgency strategy the imagined political protest community the umma is The umma are they called the umma the the community of Muslims except that the neo jihadis Really think that only they are the true Muslims and they claim to represent this community and so if you Understand that this is an imagined community, which is very real. It could be imagined, but it's not imaginary You know, there is a very strong nuance between those two words. It's a real community But they imagine themselves to be part of this umma. So you can we can destroy the Al-Qaeda we can destroy Daesh Which is called ISIS I saw you know, I don't know I mean government changes They change the names it used to be ISIL now. It's ISIS whatever The Arabs called it Daesh, you know from the same from the initial in Arabic So it could be shrinking but people identifying in with them in the West may actually expand as they see People in their community being killed abroad, you know, you still identify with them So bombing Daesh abroad may actually increase home-grown terrorism it may eliminate Daesh and It's directed attacked against the West, but you have local members in the West Who are unattached to? Daesh who are outraged by the Western state action abroad and may decide to actually carry out terrorist Operations at home on behalf of Daesh, which is exactly what's been happening in this country in the last two years CV what the government likes to do, you know, we're counting the violent extremism Which is countering the narrative of Daesh the Daesh narrative is very simple Al-Qaeda. It's make Islam great again There's no more than that You know, they still think it's really right after the death of the Prophet Islam expanded to cover Much of the non-world. That's what they want. They want to make it great again. It's nostalgia so the news and Whatever we tell them is interpreted through the prism of the social identity and they reject what Western government tells them Oh, no, this is not Islam. So what do you know? You're not Muslim, you know, I mean basically and it's pointless for to do that Against targeted outgroups what it does is that it reinforce your own in-group prejudice against the outgroup You know, you think that they do it because of this ideologies It's narrative and so you can see how it reinforce your own biases But doesn't do anything about the other guy because he's rejecting whatever you tell him because he thinks you're the enemy Loners are physical loners, but they're part of this Uma. There's no need for a direct link between Al-Qaeda, Daesh or domestic terrorist or a link to a domestic terrorist organization in the US we have no list no link We have, you know, right before They decide to carry out things they often Tweet, you know Bayat, you know, which is allegiance to Daesh, you know, which happened in San Bernardino. It happened in Orlando Ain't happening Garland, Texas In France we and Belgium there is a mixture of people who are loners like what happened 14th of July last year in Nice and Daesh linked attacks, which is what happened to Batacloin the 13th of November and of 2015 and what happened earlier that year against Charlie Hebdo This also has a very strong implication of the counterinsurgency doctrine of the army. It does not work Natives will always self-categorize in contrast to foreigners Who will never win their hearts of mind because they will always be foreigners It doesn't matter how many wells you dig For them. It doesn't matter you do one bad things and you're a foreigner and you can't completely ruin all the good action That you can see a large foreign footprint will inevitably generate local insurgency and indeed we have seen In the second half of the 20th century National liberation movements all over the world taking advantage of this and overwhelming Colonialist foreigners and chasing them out, you know that that so what can be done What can be done so the best thing is to prevent You know Turning to violence and so you prevent a politicization of private dispute. You don't skip for the community You have to have procedures to address vile grievances in legitimate ways To keep calm in the face of non-violent challenge Do not confuse non-violent legitimate protest of the political protest community with a bunch of violent guys Which are illegitimate and of course illegal CVE indicators in the west of Radicalization are really about this non-violent political protest community and If you think that you have a good indicator, you need to conduct a scientific Basin analysis of the validity what the sign you know sensitivity of this indicator what the specificity of this indicator without that You just really striking blindly You do have to punish you punishing non-violent political protesters Will turn them violent? So in a sense you kind of making the problem worse by indiscriminately Repressing challenges and Do not escalate your tone of speech vilify Challenges you don't use war metaphors. This really can have restrained the realm of possibility to solve this problem You only will lead to extreme solutions. Well, bomb them. We don't bomb them. That's it You know, that's what you left with now I mean you have to be a little bit more creative to to to really understand what's going on and To be able to do something about it You have to engage the challenges in political arena at least, you know, listen to the grievance Negotiate if appropriate you cannot always do that and you cannot Carry out with gracious aggression against challenges You have to have fairness no excessive force with in dealing with them and this really you have to train your own Police force which protects society against in turn, you know in turn discord You have to have a very disciplined and trained police especially especially crowd control most of the time that I see this You know deviation and this degradation to violence. It's because people were Demonstrating peacefully the police shot, you know into the crowd and then some people in the car today I'm going to take my revenge and you know and started this kind of violence and You have to hold therefore the police accountable for the brutality through transparent procedures Okay, so this is prevention, but what what do we do after the violence breaks out? What you do is repression with fairness and justice if you have a foreign threat Contain it abroad and You have fair repression at home of the people who are violent not the whole political protest community Do not conflict multiple local conflicts and Threats into a coordinated global one. We always do that, you know before At the time of the French Revolution people thought that the Illuminati were trying to transform all of Europe in the early 19th century in the late 19th century. They thought that they had an anarchist You know central organization a common turn Directing anarchist attack everywhere in the world, you know the communists had more than that, but it wasn't as you know Advanced as clear sterling claimed in the early 1980s So you cannot conflate multiple local threats into according to global one outrageous abroad may stimulate retaliation of homegrown violence You know at home because people identify with those victims abroad and this especially with the internet and with mass communication now So what happened if the violence actually breaks out in your own country and Enlightened state strategy of breaking the cycle of violence with stress this unfairness is really the only way Well, it's not the only way if the number of people are so small you can kill them all You know in the political protest community But if the political protest community is too large if you start killing them, you're going to have a real problem on your hand So you have to isolate and remove the bunch of violent guys from the political protest community and indeed The political protest community very often disavows a bunch of violent guys This is one of the most effective way of stopping Wave of violence, this is really what happened, you know during the Anarchist wave of violence in France in 1890s and really very much what happened in the 1970s in the leftist violence in the country people say no We went too far and so they were criticizing people were violent whether it was the weathermen or the bombing of Army math at the University of Wisconsin in August of 1970 You need to have fair police conduct no brutality and unfair profiling a bunch of violent guy profile is subjective It's just a martial social identity no sting operation a Sting operation is an unfair way to really kind of take a guy who is non-violent and can have tempted so much that The guy will go along with the undercover who actually he's his prototype and trying to imitate This is not compatible with liberal democracies In fact with the only country in the world right now that uses sting operation Every other Western country disavowed them as saying is it's not compatible with liberal democracy Bring those with no blood on their hand back to the societal fault You have to craft a sense of national identity Trumping that of the in group. This is often done Unfortunately through foreign wars. So you have a lot of domestic disputes and then when your country goes that war Somebody else, you know, everybody rallies around the flag whether it's World War one World War two Sometimes, you know that foreign war is seen as illegitimate and it may lead to even further Conflict within your countries that happen with the war in Vietnam, but you know what happens now is some of the foreign wars that we involve The government still has very strong backing of the American population Making people nonviolent people from the political protest community outlaws will prevent this it really creates a permanent barrier preventing them from reengaging into society and living violence behind You can also try to undermine the meaning of a political protest social identity if because If you part of a group and you have a prototype that you think is the most representative of your group And this prototype turns out to be a traitor. This is so demoralizing that often the group Disintegrates and breaks apart And because it disillusions are the members, but it's a very high-risk strategy because Betrayal of just regular members leads to what's called a black sheep effect people will try to kill them first Their punishment of in-group traders is much greater than punishment of out-group aggressors and this is pretty robust And you have to resist gratuitous self-promotion Like the FBI and Department of Justice does all the time when they arrest, you know a guy who You know they've convinced to to to carry out an attack through a sting operation This is you know heralded as a great victory against al-qaeda. It's nonsense It's a little loser who's often a teenager with a moron and very often Is psychologically impaired because I've interviewed quite a few of them and you have two FBI undercover one or two that kind of try to convince his gal grab it into how we have to do this because and you know And you can see that from the transcripts of their Communication because you know, of course, they are recorded to display at trial Heralding major arrest as a major victory leads to public hysteria, which we still have in this country About a threat that's really minimal at least You have to have a return to justice laws and procedures must be fair There is a difference between justice and laws many laws are unjust and People know that and understand that just like sting operations Which are you know, which is based on predisposition, which is nonsense as a try to kind of argue So you need to have impartial and transparent procedural justice with reasonable punishment You have to have you know, a very strong vigilance about bias Prosecutors because their notion is that they get promoted with the win at all costs forget about justice This is about winning for your own group as I said again, it's it's about this who you think you are and Judges, of course a partial to a prosecution because judges are still members of society and they identify Against terrorists and therefore our prejudice against I Don't think that the special terrorist enhancement in sentencing is helpful But the point here is that the above measures that have just outlined are the essence of a Western liberal democracy And that's it I'm open to question. Thank you Before we turn it over to you all I have a few questions for you first you spoke about This foundational question of how big is the political community? That distinguishes ability to pursue An alternative strategy to the one you advocate of either killing or arresting the entire community Right now there's discussion of what I presume you view as one of the more extremants of that Designating the Muslim Brotherhood But so I'm wondering if you could comment on that but also comment on where you see the political community That's being targeted or it's relevant to jihadist terrorism in a couple of other contexts that maybe aren't as clear is the community in Europe too big to Illuminate except through the strategy and then perhaps more interestingly can the United States given the size of our terrorism problem Pursued now a strategy of arrest everyone and not embrace this And could we have pursued that After 9 11 but not now The way you define yourself is contextual so it really depends on what what happens at the time If the US government, you know Bombs Muslims all over the world You're going to have an extremely large American Muslim community against the government If we refrain from doing this Well, you know, it will shrink It's really according to what's Happening at the time it's contextual and you know, it's a salience of what's happening around the world that kind of either triggers Your your identity, you know before 9 11 I was just Teaching about political violence and so on but after you know when 9 11 happened I felt very intensely fiercely American You know because they attacked people Because they were like me. So I felt like I was attacked myself And I'm using this analogy to say that the answer to your question is impossible to answer Because it depends on the context. So any given day I can give you perhaps a In some answers so that the most unjust The government is towards people that you think The same community as you the more angry you're going to be against your government The more just your government will be the less That will matter to you and you will be a good husband and father to your kids Because it would not be relevant You see that the whole idea of one social identity is a very Fluid And changing concept now. What can we do about this? I think that just Turning down some of the rhetoric that you hear Would definitely help because what it does is that it It Excludes Muslim from the American nation the u.s. Nation, you know, so you're different and we're going to treat you differently And and so well, you know, this is going to enlarge You know the community of people who are going to be against The u.s. Government Now what we have here in the u.s. Is extremely different from europe Uh, in a sense europe, especially french speaking europe What they have now is A consequence of their Colonial Past where for 132 years They had occupied a country, algeria declared it to be french But treated native algerians very differently from The french they they they actually had the louis de l'indigenin in 1881 which Very much reduced them to serve them, you know, they they They could not vote they They had to work for free on a landlord's property as I said serve them something that they had You know eliminated during the french revolution they brought it back So the the second the third generation Still feel excluded from france Some people in the second or third generation I must say that with a number of muslims that france has it's by far the most Integrated muslim community in france So we're talking about a very small number maybe 10 000 at most of a community that perhaps is five million So you you're talking about very very small numbers, but those numbers are much much larger than what we have in this country Where we don't even know what the the size of a muslim community maybe Between two and three million as most people estimate, but the size of those are fairly Extremist Muslim by extremist, I mean people who can't interact with each other on Who follow each other on twitter on Instagram on on various social media and can develop this kind of imagined community without Being a card carrying member of that community because it really can depends on the context so one of the implications of your talk is that We are able to make strategic choices based on this model Um, some have argued that isos and other groups have made a strategic choice certainly influenced as you said by Our decimation of their actual organizational structure to loosen their requirements for what constitutes participation in identity to accept that um facebook post as sufficient proof of identity rather than going to the training camp or Being screened by a physical recruiter um, I'm wondering if you think that poses challenges for your data's exclusion of people who you categorize as simply um Mentally off or not part of the political community if the Barrier to entry to become part of the political community is rapidly declining Either for technological or strategic choice reasons Well, there's no barrier to entering an imagined community. Just who you think you are You know, they you don't have to pay A membership fee. You don't have to do things. It really depends on who you think you are and And The way to have a look at this is to really have a historical View of things, you know, there were a lot of foreign fighters Throughout history some of them we You know glorify them marquis de la faillette foreign fighter did you had you right there? Uh, you know, costusco again foreign fighter from poland again, I you know identify as a great hero for us and then you had Foreign legends like the french army, which one are independence? I mean, it wasn't washington's militia one day dependence yorktown was fought by the french The navy was a french navy that blotated the the british navy from trying to You know bring them food and and supplies So that you can see that foreign fighter You know the most romantic fight was a greek fight against the otterman in the 1820s You know lord byron and so on. I mean this is uh, then we had the lincoln brigade, you know that kind of went But you had tens of thousands of french people who went to spain being killed by the francos regime So you can see that When they come back They weren't violent They weren't necessarily violent, but some of them are come back and because You know they they have this mentality and that's why you know, you have people who have been Arrested want to go into animal have been released And so they may have been fine when they were released. They were probably non-violent But you know the the political situation evolved where you know, they started re-identifying and says, you know I cannot abide by that. I have to do something So they will go to syria and urak to to fight and so we say oh my god, you know We made a mistake. We released them now I think that it's what i'm talking about it's contextual and the context changes those people may be predisposed To to becoming violent or they may actually attain some type of wisdom that They say look, uh, I understand that i'm really really angry and I want to to to be violent, but That doesn't lead me to anything So let me count, you know put violence aside and protest now Legally And you see a lot of people like that, you know that that's you see a lot of people who were advocating violence now do not and You know, they try to talk to young people, especially They try to do that in danmark and and holland in france to total failure Let's take your questions Let's do up here Hi, thank you for that. My name is alexandra and I recently just finished my masters from the london school of economics and terrorism and human rights And my question to you is in my my research in my work. I kind of Solid divide between the academic and scholarly community on terrorism And then the community of you know intelligence Workers and governments who are actually working on this issue in the world And I wonder in your work of you know, kind of bridging that divide If you've experienced governments who you know, maybe you're becoming more aware of their role in exacerbating political violence and terrorism And you know what you've experienced with that. Thank you Excellent question As I tried to tell you As I introduced myself this View would have been impossible for me to hold four years ago Simply because I didn't have the distance to see what I was doing And realizing that I also was part of a group namely the group that fought the terrorist And therefore I defined myself in contrast with the terrorist as you know With time I was able to transcend that perspective and try to kind of Be a little bit with more equanimity to kind of see how each side Contributes to the violence which as a member of Of a group fighting is really very very difficult to do you know You know you fight During world war two the Germans are shooting at you And you know, you can't think well, you know, we can't contribute to this fight as well. No, no, you should back So you can see that You yes, they should be a divide. Unfortunately the divide is not strong enough because most academics On on this topic or researching this topic are paid by the government And therefore they identify with the government And they're self-censored. There are things they cannot think Because this would be almost prohibited thought You know because there would be then traded to they were on group the government fighting the terrorist And so yes, you're absolutely right. There is a huge divide and they need to be they should be yet chilling it's very interesting And I've got sort of a couple of comic Type questions because it seems like what you're describing and after I've talked to soldiers and stuff about how they're willing to sacrifice to the one way of interpreting what's going on with the ISIS-based terrorism is an international guerrilla war Where they're out fighting some of them quasi independent for the reasons that you described They've become feeling very violent and that raises the question based on Your comments about how to deal with it with proper policing and stuff how to manage this without having a global political system Because these feel very much outside the political system that we're dealing with so it becomes very hard and it seems to me that The last part of the question is the um verbal declarations of war By president trump are they go to increase the reactions of these terrorists who feel like they're being more Intensely threatened and what would be a better way of reducing their feelings of threat? Let me try the last one first and then try to answer the other two Trump's declaration of war On isis is totally relevant Isis is at war with us. We're at war with them. So this is just the fact now what The real question is that how is this going to play among muslim americans here? In a sense you may feel excluded perhaps Just declaring war on isis will have no effect on them. It's you know Having them feel like they are different from other americans ID. They play by different rules You know, they have to have different even though if the americans Like Muhammad Ali's son coming back. Are you muslim? It's really differently And that has much stronger effect Than what president trump would say because president, you know, we're at war with them. We're at war with us. That's uh It's not really global isis is fighting for its life in the middle east A very small part of isis Is interested in international operation most of them are french because Or bell french speakers belgian tunisians Simply because of the numbers and they kind of got together in uh french-speaking katibas, you know French-speaking battalions and you know as they fight they talk and say you know friends. I mean they're really the leaders Of the coalition bombing us You know, it was friends that kind of prodded us americans to actually join the fight against isis They were the first ones and so you can see that some french people in those katibas Decided well, we're going we want to do things back in france and belgium and France and belgium have a problem because you can actually drive to the battlefield And indeed they've done that, you know a lot of people and we talk about 2 000 people about 1300 1500 french people about 700 belgian people have You know gone to turkey some by plane, but many of them by car They rent a car and they just take the car across and over the bridge in istanbul Right, you know right south to to raca and there they are with their night 4x4 So frances and belgium europe has a much greater problem because of this potential of Of going back and forth. I mean it really has diminished tremendously In the last two years, I must say, but they have a lot of people that have come back And they're not necessarily violent and I forgot your first question Of the three The first one the first comment All about the international gorilla. Yeah, okay, so I answered that. I'm sorry. Okay. Thanks. Um Just drawing on your experience as a cia field officer the us Through the cia funded alongside the isi the afghan mojahedin there were foreign fighters there There was a disposal problem afterwards in the 90s Um People went back to their home countries with cia and isi hunter killer training and there was you know terrorism um What do you think of the cia's programs to? um, and to arm allies to sorry to arm proxy groups in syria similar programs were seen in libya We've seen destabilization around libya as the result of arms flooding in um, and the u.s. Allies turkey cutter and saudi arabia are also funding these rebel groups You know looking forward and drawing on your own experience in afghanistan You know, what do you see happening there? Do you forecast a? disposal problem as a result of Our own policies carried out specifically through operation timbers sycamore um You know The cia is guilty And the cia is guilty not of Supporting the foreign fighters in afghanistan because they never did that nor did isi But the guilty of not of keeping secrets and therefore There's never been a good history of the afghan-soviet war of the 1980s None I mean you have like segments of histories. You have some count memories You have some journalists to count Italian and french journalists who tried to come Describe the war but you really don't have Anyone and it would be a great service to declassify some of those Cables that were sent from the field back and forth and you'll see that there was absolutely no contact between non afghans and The cia Now did the isi fund The afghan arab's no they did not We kept very very close Surveillance of what the isi did because we didn't trust them You know with that type of money and those type of weapons We wanted to make sure that they went to whoever they were supposed to go Now isi had a bias. I mean they loved guldberg in het matia. We did not except for maybe for my boss Although now he denies it That's mild beard But No, you know, there's this kind of conundrum that we either supported or trained Arab afghan Keeps on surfacing despite the denials of al qaeda despite the denials of the government despite the denials of anybody who's been there but still It's good press and you know, it's a type of You know news that That seems to be popular simply because you know a bunch of guys Could not possibly have done 9 11. Well, they did Uh, so the point is that I'm this was not uh, you know, cia trained cia Supported uh people in uh up to 1991 which is when uh, I was support stopped for the afghans Uh, this is very much contextual, you know, as I try to explain everything contextual So, you know, you could not really trace a linear pathway from You know the soviet withdrawal and the fight in afghanistan to 9 11 they needs to be a lot of things. It needs to be the iraq invasion of kawaii. They needs to be You know the sudanese support of terrorism And then because of sanctions, the sudanese kicked them out. They go back to afghanistan And you know, there needs to be a lot of things. It's not the straight path So the point is that it's very hard to anticipate what's going to happen. Certainly. It's a danger that you're going to have Uh this potential uh bleed out from what's happening in iraq and syria As the french and the belgians have discovered, you know, because a few of them At least you know Half a dozen operation came from syria and iraq, but for the rest Like the nis, you know 86 people being killed. That was totally homegrown On behalf of isis, but they had been no contact So it's really You know very hard to anticipate, you know wars and People get demobilized and soldiers who killed and killed and killed During wars like world war two and world war one come back home and and do not kill anymore So it's really, you know, as I say it's contextual It's it's very hard to anticipate because it very much depends on what our policy will be What's our allies policy? What's going to happen? In the middle east and it's a complete mess right now over there So it's really very hard to anticipate. I wish I you know, I had the better crystal ball But what i'm telling you is that all those fast style projections will be all wrong A bit more of a general question from your data. Do you see any distinguishing characteristics in civil wars? Intrination as opposed to some of the the rest of the discussion Well, civil wars are basically just an example of this You know, it's If you looked at my slides on campaign campaigns of violence it could actually grow into a civil war and you know, we've had that Happening for instance as the Algerian war was actually a civil war And so you started from a campaign of violence to You know 10 million people thinking that they were no longer French because the French were killing them Even though the French said well, you you really are French, but they called them français musulman d'Algerie Which is not just they're not just français That would be okay, but you know when you start putting Adjectives, you know, that means you really not like us and so no you You can have it the same process. You just have people on either sides. They volunteer to become soldiers people of Who then you know volunteer to join the army are real soldiers who is uniformed they trained by the government but on the other side the other thing that the soldiers they may not have the same training but It it's very similar process and they all you know hate each other and decide to kill each other More encodes very very interesting and thank you Is is the extent to which Islam as a ideological or religious basis for the appeal Important or not important we've had this strange political debate about whether to call them radical is Islamist terrorists or or whatever It would it would seem to have a lot of implications for how to deal with them or approach them Encouraging an Islamic Reformation for example to sort of isolate the more conservative interpretations is From what you've said that all seems to be rather not very important. It's not it's not I mean to The point that Islam constitutes part of one's identity. It is important to a person. So for instance You're a non-muslim You have friends, you know you're attracted to what they do do something nice about this communal feeling that islam has you know much more than You know other religion, I mean you're supposed to pray together. I mean truth have that you have to have a minion and some Evangelical fundamentalist christian communities also have this kind of communal thing But some people may be very attractive to this communal so they decide to become muslim So because they made the effort You know islam becomes important to them And when they see some of their Correligionist being killed And nobody cares in the west, you know, you talk about hundreds of thousands about assets barrel bombs and so on They say you know, but nobody's doing anything This is why you have so many converts a disproportional amount of convert Because islam is important to them. They identify with other muslims They identify with the victims of this conflict and therefore because you know islam is more important They decide in in disproportionate numbers to join Most muslims don't care Most muslims are just you know, I'm a father. I'm trying to make a ends meet and you know I was just born muslim happened to be muslim, you know, maybe I go to The mosque once a week on friday or It's not as important because but but the guy who made an effort that's important to him And I think that in that sense islam May predispose you to identify with victims That you and you see the outrage and say I cannot stand by you know, I have to do something to To defend them. So that that's really the only element Of islam that's really kind of important. It's not really so much and You know almost any muslim. It's not just salafi That that kind of feel that way the salafi's Account of reverts and so islam is important to them. It could be like just converts But but you know The the afghans were not Salafi the pakistanis were not salafi You know most People from saddam hussein's army that joined ices were not really salafi So you can see it's not just a version of islam and whether it is going to be some reformation Now islam was born with reformation because there is no one united church of islam There's not one pope. There's not you know, the reformation was Really a rebellion against a pope and so islam doesn't need that because it's really fairly decentralized From the beginning and so you don't really need that type of reformation But you know in terms of treating them differently From american citizen that that that that could have an impact But but islam itself. No, I don't think that uh For for ices in the in the beginning at least they seem to make a great deal out of Reestablishing physically the caliphate That's very islamist Faced I mean was that not important actually in attracting people. No, we're attractive people were really kind of the tweeters of some Tunisians were kicked out of tunisia our friend speaking tunisian who kind of then posted on facebook and tweeters You know who I am I have a big house I have a four by four. This is my kalashnikov. I'm really cool and you know and and people living in the ball year of paris and molembeck and Saying that and the second-class citizens. They have no job. They're unemployed You know the heat is does they call them? heat is A wall in everything so they they can't just hold the wall and boy that's attractive So they they they come because they thought that was the utopia Most of those guys are not intellectual. They don't understand what people tell them in terms of This is caliphate and so on. I mean they mouth the words but In a dealing with intellectual this wave of terrorism. It's not like the 9 11 guys where you know the pilots were You know graduate students from hamburg And therefore more likely to respond to intellectual argument these guys are not They they they They didn't even make it to eighth grade most of them Let's take this question down here and that will be our last one Thank you very much. Benjamin to it. Could you speak to uh, the volunteers for the islamic state from russia And the former soviet territories russia including cheshire, of course, but other areas Where they motivated By religious sense some other Reasons and apparently the numbers are quite large. They're apparently units that are russian speaking and Isis and so on You know the The folks from central asia, you know the former Soviet republics are fascinating. I interviewed a few of them And to them is really regaining their traditional identity that was completely eliminated by the soviets And uh, you know, they feel very proud. They usually come from a very warrior tribe warrior like tribe And there's a great pride about You know, they are past and You know, they feel completely persecuted by you know, for instance asimov Who was the huzbeck president and you know all those guys, you know, they're just hearing these out there They they slaughtered their people and they're afraid of islam So they they try to repress islam. So those guys, you know, they define themselves against as in contrast to to to all You know the state that persecutes them and You know to them they're part of this umma. That's their identity and the umma is being attacked in Iraq and syria. They go there to defend it They you know, they feel closer to those guys than they do To people of their own central states of of asia Well, um, do you have any concluding remarks? No, I have no, I can't take one more So My definition of political is the original definition of political it deals with the policy the community And so anything attacking your community Is political if you want to defend your community, that's political whether your community is identified on a religious basis On another an ethnic base or an occupational base. It does not matter to me. That's political Yeah, that's correct because it's a community anything that has to do is a community That's in danger trying to defend itself is political to in my sense of the word political Yes So with that, I'd like to thank dr. Sageman His book misunderstanding Is outside And i'm sure he'd be happy to sign any copies he may have