 It's a real pleasure to be here with all of you. It's an honor to follow Ambassador Moose and Dr. Natali. And I also had the honor, as Leah mentioned, of serving on the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, which met here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. And on behalf of that Task Force, I really want to thank all the members of the Resolve Network and all of you who are engaged in research on extremism because the Task Force really benefited from the work of researchers. So many of us had worked on this issue before. Anyone who's worked on this issue is frustrated by this issue. And we really sort of put it to the researchers that were supporting us to show us what works, show us what we have learned. And people were able to do that. And that really, I think, benefited the Task Force in the report. So here we are to do a fireside chat. There's no fire. I understand the other talks are TED-style talks. I've never seen a TED talk, but I understand they're short and to the point. And so that's what we're going to aim for here is to be to the point. It's a real pleasure to be here with JM as well, who's one of the most respected scholars on this particular issue, as everyone knows. And we're just going to try to sort of skim the top of the waves a bit as a way of teeing up the rest of the discussions today. And this is an issue where I feel as though we always have to start with our first principles, unlike some of the other issues I deal with. The definitional issues are quite important. So I thought we would start there, JM. And I thought we would start with the very basic question of, how should we define extremism? What is extremism? And how important is it that we have a common definition for that? Yeah, so the definitional issue has been my big cause for the last couple of years. I think that we have struggled with this, and it's a very consequential issue because if we don't understand extremism as a field and as a unified kind of phenomenon, we can't really study it in a systematic way. And we can't create policies that are fair and objective. So we need to understand the things that make jihadism like white nationalism, like anarchism, ecoterrorism. There needs to be some way we understand these things in a coherent kind of framework that lets us talk about all those things as being related to each other. Beyond our just instinctive understanding that they're related. So what I've been arguing for is a definition that is sort of grounded in social identity theory that comes out of work that I've done and also the work of Hororo Ingram, who's written some really great material on this and proposed a sort of extremist system of meaning that can guide a definition. Which is that extremism is the belief that your group, the in-group cannot be secure or survive without taking hostile action against an out-group. And that hostile action is always necessary because of the inherent nature of the out-group. So it's a commitment to always always being engaged in hostile action against some group that is not your own. And hostile, I think, is an important word in this because a lot of our conversations about extremism have naturally revolved around violence. That's obviously a high priority. Terrorism, for a long time, a lot of the field was very concerned with terrorism and didn't use the word extremism that much at first, in the immediate years after 9-11. And slowly we've come to understand that extremism is more than just terrorism. So it can be a state-like apparatus, like ISIS. It can be political. It can be harassment, such as all right online. There are a lot of different dimensions. It's the hostility. It's the fact that you're taking action against that out-group that makes you an extremist. So you mentioned the sort of distinction between extremism and violent extremism. As we think about this from the perspective sort of both of the researcher and the policymaker, should we only be concerned with violent extremism or do we need to sort of start with extremism and why? Why would you sort of give the answer you do? I think we need to be concerned beyond violent extremism. Violent extremism is a natural priority for policymakers. It is a government role to ensure the safety of its citizens. So that is a natural focus and an appropriate focus for government efforts. But as an academic community, as the people out here who are working to study this, as people who are working as activists, and to an extent as people who are shaping policy, we need to understand it more broadly because movements can go back and forth between violent and nonviolent modes. Pre-violent activity can lead to violent activity sometimes. Sometimes it will lead to people sort of scaling back what they're doing. It's important for us to understand that either way. We need to know if a movement is tipping toward violence or if it's going to step away from violence. We need to know why. What are the factors that cause a movement to step back from violence? Something in that respect that I think we don't talk about much because it's a difficult thing for policymakers is what kinds of intermediate steps are we going to accept below the level of complete theoreticalization. So if you're dealing, this comes up in Syria, obviously, with Toriyar al-Sham, I think is kind of the preeminent example of this. If a group steps back from the most extreme interpretation, but it's still pretty extreme, how do we deal with that? Do we want to incentivize groups to do that? Do we want to praise a group that does that, even though it's still very extreme, but has taken a step back and disassociated itself from global al-Qaeda, particular kinds of attacks? So I think there's a lot of really complicated stuff in this space that we've only just begun to discuss and explore. I also want to ask you another distinction, which is this question of, we're talking about extremism, well, what about the extremists themselves? Can we study sort of all groups or all those who practice extremism sort of on the same footing? So if you have extremism that is espoused by a state, either for ideological or political purposes, can you study it in the same way that you'd study extremism as espoused by, say, a non-state actor or a movement? Is there a distinction to be drawn there? There's a distinction in terms of the kinds of practices, but they're definitely of a kind, and we need to be able to integrate that. So my litmus test for a definition of extremism is that it has to include the Nazis at all stages in their development. If you have a definition of extremism that excludes the Nazis at any point in the Nazi regime, then it's missing something really important. So I think that- It sounds like a fair litmus test. Yeah, well, and I think that we've been very focused on non-state actors, which is appropriate to some extent, certainly. September 11th has shaped a lot of our response to this, and so that was carried out from a non-state actor. But if we look at ISIS, ISIS is pushing that borderline, or was, pushing that borderline between being a state and being a non-state actor. It's a proto-state, so do we stop considering them extremism if they become a state? I don't think we do. So all of these factors, I think that what we're lacking, there's a lot of people who are working on comparative studies of extremism, and a lot of people in this room. And what we're lacking is a systematic way to do that, to sort of view the field as a coherent whole and what goes into the study and what stays out. We spent a lot of time initially on this question, and the task force on extremism, the scoping question in a sense of what actually is the problem that we're as a group trying to tackle. And there was both the kind of theoretical question, but also the practical question of when we're recommending solutions, who are we recommended they be directed towards. Another sort of category question maybe is, or maybe a question of priority, is should we focus more on extremisms that have broad appeal, sort of global ideologies, or ideologies of global appeal or that feature global networks. More than we focus on, say, extremism that might be particular to a place or to a smaller group that doesn't have that kind of global appeal. Is it, can we learn from those as much as we can learn from the global ideologies? I think we can learn as much from each of them. Who deals with it and at what scope are valid questions, depending on how popular movement is and how widespread it is. We also run into a lot of problems, the most popular kinds of extremism become related to power structures, political power structures, social power structures. And it becomes much more difficult to deal with them as extremism. So just the sort of easy, low hanging fruit on this is that there are millions of white nationalists, people with white nationalist beliefs in the United States compared to at most a couple thousand people who are ISIS supporters, but look at our resource distribution on that. Right, I want to talk about something else you've written about. And for those of you who haven't seen it, you should see it. JM had a chapter that he wrote, I think back in June, is that right? A research report for the Resolve Network where he goes through a lot of these issues. It's a fascinating paper and I would definitely recommend it to everyone here. But one of the things you write about in this research report is the shift that has taken place, which again, the task force that I served on, sort of focused on quite a bit, from just talking about countering terrorism or fighting terrorism to talking about the preventing and countering violent extremism framework. Now that that shift has sort of been at least a few years now sort of in place. I'm wondering what you think about, what have the implications of it been? What are the successes of the shift? What are the failures of making that shift? I think that the big problem in the space has been the same problem that was associated with counterterrorism, which is that having become a national priority, we put massive amounts of money into it without really demanding accountability. So anybody who had a great idea got some money to work on it and didn't necessarily have to report measurable results. Didn't have to come back with metrics that show how you were preventing violent extremism. You could come back with metrics. People would come back, we were talking, Leigh Ann mentioned, some of us, and Assistant Secretary Natali mentioned some of this. We come back with metrics that say we created jobs, but we can't come back with metrics that say that creating jobs reduced violent extremism. So I think at this point, I think this is a widely recognized problem. And hopefully the next generation of programs that we put onto this will have more accountability, will have more measurable outputs that are related to violent extremism and not to our assumptions about what's causing it. And what about successes? Do you think there have been any real sort of gains that you can point to of shifting this from the counterterrorism to the P-CVE network? I think that, no. I think that there are certainly some programs that are good. There are people who are doing good work. Moonshot CVE, I think, is one that's particularly strong. Mofluen doing kind of individual intervention work. A number of groups have popped up on the far right side over the last couple of years doing this. And that's all private sector, basically. Some of it is government supported or funded. And some of these programs are good. But surrounding these successes are just a gigantic industry of people churning out social media metrics and monitoring lists and a lot of kind of aimless, aimless programming. So it's a kitchen sink. But you don't find anywhere else in government. No, never. It's not a common problem at all. So it's kind of the kitchen sink approach in that some things, you throw everything at the wall and a few things do stick. But I think that we're probably due for a reckoning on this whole industry. Well, and since we're one of the things I think we're looking at here today, and which I think is great about the Resolve Network, is this kind of nexus between research and policy. Do you think that policymakers and researchers are sort of in the same place on this shift, on whether it should be made, on the value of it, and so forth, or are there differences? I think people are coming around. I think there's sort of a broad recognition at this point that we need to do more. The research, there's been a lot of great research done on this topic and related topics over the last several years. There's been a lot of noise, but there's been a lot of really kind of good, insightful, focused stuff. And the trick is sifting through this very large body of literature. I mean, just since September 11th, the body of literature on terrorism and extremism has exploded. So there's just so much of it. So sifting through it, finding what you can do in a sort of actionable way and then doing it, I mean, it sounds simple. It's not, it's actually very complicated to do each step in that process. And I don't want to be, you know, I mean, my kind of response a few minutes ago is probably more negative than I intended it to be. I think that we have a lot of, it's sort of like an ocean of people working on this and there's a lot of people making individual progress or small group progresses. And the problem is I don't think that's kind of cohered into an industry-wide systematic approach to the problem. And to what extent is that sort of blocked by or affected by sort of the political ups and downs in Washington? I mean, maybe it's a delicate question, but because this is a research area that depends so much on government engagement and government funding, you know, how much is it subject to the vagaries of kind of political climate here in Washington? Well, the good news is that because of an abundance of funding starting from 2001 and running up until fairly recently, the field is pretty established. So there's a lot of people working on this. They're committed to this. They have departments. They have programs. So it's more self-sustaining than it was before. But the presence of government funding, I think, also shaped the kind of research that we did. So we have disproportionate research on jihadism versus white nationalism. Other and then other kinds of extremism or distant, distant third, if even that. And so the funding, whatever funding levels exist, I think they sort of shaped us. And I think the abundance of funding also contributed to a lot of vaporware-type projects, a lot of pie-in-the-sky kind of research that is actually worth conducting, but it's a lot of money that goes to things that didn't work out. So I think the environment is somewhat tighter now from the government side. I think that the social media companies are now stepping up and they bring their own perverse incentives to the research program. You know, I think overall our funding sources, and I mean, I'm not exempting myself from this in any way. I take money from all these people that I just mentioned. And they're all watching, so be careful. Yeah, well, everybody knows that I'm a bit of a loose cannon on this. So it's what you put up with when you deal with me. I think, you know, it shapes the research. So sometimes it can shape it in innocuous ways, which is here's a bunch of money to research something that's kind of interesting, but maybe isn't a top priority, but, you know, it's interesting. So hey, I'm going to do it. Other times it creates incentives to do research that is just because there's this big pot of money in the university, for instance, might want a big piece of that pot of money. And then finally, it's really driven by the incentives that each of those sponsors have. So I think, ultimately, you know, making extremism studies and terrorism studies into more of a regular academic pursuit will be better for the research that's produced. I want to shift a bit into this question of how we're doing when it comes to countering violent extremism or preventing it. And as I said, you know, for all the members of the task force, there was a great deal of frustration. And we were surprised nevertheless actually to see the numbers on just how much extremism has spread around the world since 9-11 and how little success, frankly, all these efforts at countering it or rolling it back have had. And again, we were surprised to find that there was, even at this stage, you know, 17, 18 years after 9-11, a pretty poor understanding on the part of policymakers about what drives extremism. How do you account for that? I mean, do you think that there is a disconnect between policymakers and researchers on this question of drivers of extremism? And what can we do to get people to better understand what the drivers are? Yeah, so I think, you know, that's a pretty fair assessment. I mean, it's kind of difficult to know. I mean, we put all this effort into these programs. One reason we can't say that they're super successful is because we haven't figured out what our metrics are. And we don't have a way to control, you know, what would extremism look like if we hadn't been doing all these things, you know, with all the other factors. So extremism is growing in part because of new technologies like social media. And so it may, we may be doing things that are successful, but extremism will continue to increase because the structural factors are encouraging it more. And then there's also a question of drivers. So a lot of the bad assumptions about drivers that I've heard certainly have originated in policy community. You know, I go to a meeting in government and, you know, people just have very intuitive ideas about what causes extremism. And it's very difficult to move them off of that. So poverty being one of the most persistent ones. One of the areas that I'm interested in, in my research, is actually looking at the question of the role of uncertainty. So there's something called uncertainty identity theory, which is by a social psychologist named Michael Hogg, which has found pretty good empirical evidence to suggest that when people are experiencing uncertainty, they look for things to reduce that uncertainty. And that extremist ideas are a way to reduce uncertainty. And it kind of offers a way to square the circle on some of these driver questions, like poverty doesn't correlate to extremism, but sudden poverty, a sudden economic upturn, the loss of an industry that had supported people or even sudden wealth, in some cases. Anything that really upsets the status quo, upsets people's understanding of where they fit in the world may be related to that. And that may be a way to redeem some of these driver questions, that certain places a jobs program might be a good thing. Certain places education might be a good thing, but not as a universal policy. I think the point you're making there is the importance of tailored understanding and tailored approaches to these problems in different places around the world, which again is something that came out pretty clearly, I think, for us as we spoke to researchers. I want to talk about one driver in particular, and it's something that Dr. Natale actually mentioned in her comments, and that's ideology, because this is a driver that policymakers do tend to focus on a lot. They like to devise policies to try to combat ideology. And so I want to ask you, do you think we have over or under-emphasized or rightly emphasized the importance of ideology? And have we been successful, have we figured out how to combat it successfully sitting here in Washington, DC? So the latter question is a pretty easy no. The former question is I think that it is appropriate to recognize the importance of ideology. If you don't have an ideology attached to violence, then it's just random violence, or it's criminal violence is profit, violence for profit. The thing that defines extremist violence is that it's driven by an ideology that is not profit, that is not random. And so you can't, you don't have extremism if you don't have ideology on there. Understanding it as a driver is a more complicated question. To adopt, to become part of ISIS, you have to get the ideology somewhere. You have to, it has to be transmitted to you somehow. The question is whether the ideology shapes somebody who already has an inclination to violence, structures their violence. We know that that happens, right? Ideology structures violence. We don't know if ideology causes violence or if that violence would come out in other ways if the ideology wasn't there. And there's a question from the audience which I think is an interesting question, which is somewhat related because you've talked about the sort of role of ideology in sustaining violence. Someone's asking about the role of violence in sort of sustaining the success of the extremism. So it's almost kind of the opposite. Would you say that for an extremist group, do they at some point need to advocate or adopt violence to survive? Do we have lots of examples of extremist groups that have been peaceful and have nevertheless thrived as movements or as groups? So peaceful and nonviolent are not necessarily the same thing. Which is why I went with the word hostile in my definition of extremism. So you can understand hostile behavior as violence. You can understand harassment as psychic violence. You can understand discrimination as structural violence. So you don't have extremism without that piece, that form of attack that comes in maybe physical violence as we understand it, maybe something else. I think that physical violence is, and this is, I'm looking at this more in depth in my dissertation research, which I'm currently ongoing so I'm not, I don't have complete answers to this yet. I know never to ask anybody about their dissertation, so I... You could, I love talking about it, but my point being, I don't think I personally don't feel like I'm at a place where I can fully answer that, but I think that there are structural incentives for extremist groups to continue to radicalize, to escalate the kinds of hostile action they wanna take. And some groups, I don't think that you, I think what's probably most unlikely, and somebody here may be very able to correct me, so I'll say this with some humility attached to it. I think what's most unlikely is for a group to sort of stay in that middle zone where they're engaged in systematic kind of hostile behavior but don't escalate the violence. But that doesn't mean they're always gonna escalate the violence. Some groups will get up to that point and then ease back. And that's a process that we really need to understand better. One thing we haven't done is study extremist movements of the fizzle, and it's very difficult to do that because when they fizzle, we don't find out about them. Extremist movement gets to a certain point and then goes back, draws back. Why does that happen? And can we encourage that to happen? So there aren't, I'm sure people in this audience probably can suggest some case studies on that and I would love to see some off the top of my head. I think of something like the John Birch Society which sort of went up to a certain point, had a certain amount of success, and then tapered off and never went away. It's still out there, actually. But it never achieved critical mass and it's not a significant player in that scene as we understand it today. How much of a problem is this? You write about this a little bit in the paper I referenced. How much of a problem is it in the research community to sort of agree on who you're studying in a sense? To agree that, well, that's an extremist group, a new extremist group especially, with others saying, oh no, it's not. It's not quite up to that line. Yeah, so I mean, I can't get people to agree that Nazis are extremists, so I'll tweet about this and I invariably get from very smart people who I respect will come back and say, well, Nazis were popular, they represented the mainstream of German society, so they're not extremists. So if I can't get people to agree on that, then you can imagine that getting people to agree on up-and-coming groups is even more difficult. I think the definition, we come back to the definitional problem because we need to define the field in some useful way so that most of us are studying mostly the same stuff. You'll never get perfect agreement. Everybody will always have their own definition at the beginning of a paper or a book or a dissertation and they will include the groups they want to include, but what we need is really a coherent understanding of the kinds of groups we're gonna study so that we can do comparative and longitudinal study of groups. We need to be able to compare how white nationalists and jihadists function. We need to be able to compare how Nazis function compared to al-Qaeda, why one has a certain kind of success and one has a different kind of success, and we need to be able to look at them longitudinally. The other element of the definition that I'm using and particularly its focus on nonviolent behavior is that in a practical terms, this isn't gonna stop somebody from studying it, but if you're studying ex-group and it has a history of being a kind of a popular movement that engages in nonviolent activity, then it tips over into violence, then it tips back away from violence. It's still the same kind of group throughout that history. Similarly, a lot of the definitions of extremism that are currently out there are based on extremism, defining extremism, the people who don't want Nazis included, defined extremism as being outside the mainstream. It's a fringe movement, so the Nazis can't be extremists because they're not a fringe movement, but the Nazis didn't start off being the mainstream. They started off as a fringe movement. They became the mainstream and then they reverted to being an extreme to a fringe movement. They didn't stop being Nazis during that period. So I just think where we need to go, I think, so that we need more systematic and kind of high level comparative and longitudinal study of these groups and I think a good definition empowers that. So we have only a couple of minutes left for our fireless fireside chat. And so I wanna come back to this question since we do have policymakers who will be watching of metrics and what success looks like. You know, as a director of a research institute, I have very uncomfortable relationship with metrics, but I know it's important for policymakers. And so I think the question which arises is what does success look like against extremism and what are the sort of key things that you would recommend to make it more successful? We talked a little bit about some of the diffuse nature of the researcher, of the funding and so forth. We talked about some of the lack of success that you feel as though it's had. What does success look like and what do we need to get there? Is it more resources? Is it a different focus? Is it a definition? I think success looks like management of the problem. But not defeating extremism. We've had extremism always throughout human history, recorded human history. You can find movements that fit my definition of extremism and that will fit other peoples. There is some argument that it is inherent to the nature of society and psychology of individuals and groups. It's a problem to be managed. You can't wipe it out. You can't eliminate it. We're not gonna have that perfect society someday where nobody has any kind of bigotry or hatred or violence. But it's like crying. We manage it. So when you see crime increasing in an area, you put more resources on that area. A part of the definitional issue here is knowing where to put resources. By most kind of metrics, you would look at white nationalism as the most serious problem than jihadism in this country. There are reasons why we've focused on jihadism, some good and some bad. But ultimately, what we see is that there's a very strong and resurgent white nationalist movement in this country. And so that is somewhere where we should put attention. So the fact that we're always running around putting out fires is not necessarily bad. It's part of, it's inherent to the problem. You're always gonna have fires so you're always gonna have a fire department that has to go rush and put out that fire. So what you wanna look for is, if there's a team of arsonists working in your neighborhood, how do you disrupt that? Functionally, from a policy standpoint, I think you do that, you can use more kinetic kinds of approaches to that by arresting or exposing people who are recruiters, exposing networks, cutting off money, cutting off resources. An ideology can't spread unless it's disseminated. So the deep platforming that we're seeing now is a useful tool for managing the problem. It doesn't get rid of them, but it's a management tool. Deciding where you're gonna draw the lines on deep platforming is a whole different fireside chat. I think, mostly I think that the more we have a toolkit of understanding of which groups we're including in here, how those groups evolve over time, why do they tip toward violence, why do they tip away from violence, why do they tip toward being more extreme, whether having more hostile views of the outgroup or embracing more hostile actions. And so if we can identify those factors at the group level, that's a useful way to approach this problem. And that sounds like a nice way to tee up a lot of the conversations that we're gonna have later on today at this forum. So I think one thing that came out very clearly and all the people we talked to on the task force was that this is a problem, and certainly not all policy problems that we look at are this way, where researchers, policymakers, and the public all agree that it's important, that it's urgent, that we need to tackle it. And so thank you very much, JM, for the work you've done on it. Thank you to everybody else here who's engaged in research on it. And thank you to USIP.