 Hi everyone, welcome. Good afternoon and welcome to New America. Thank you all for coming to our session, Extremism, What It Is and How Does It Relate to Violence? My name is Melissa Sallikverk and I'm a policy analyst with New America's International Security Program. For those of you new to New America, we are a think and action tank, a civic platform that connects a research institute, technology lab, solutions network, media hub and public forum. And the International Security Program aims to provide evidence-based analysis of some of the toughest security challenges facing American policymakers and the public. Our research has addressed homegrown American terrorism, the United States drone wars abroad and the proliferation of drones around the world and the profound changes in warfare brought by new technology and societal changes. I'd like to introduce you to our two panelists today, J.M. Berger and Dr. Mary Beth Altier. J.M. Berger is the author of Extremism, which was released last month through MIT Press. He is a research fellow with Voxpol and a post-graduate research student at Swansea University School of Law, where he studies extremist ideologies. Berger is co-author with Jessica Stern of ISIS, The State of Terror and author of Jihad Joe, Americans who go to war in the name of Islam. Other major publications examine terrorist propaganda, right-wing extremist movements and the use of social media by extremists and other bad actors. As a consultant for social media and security companies and government agencies, he conducts research and training on issues related to online extremism, advanced social media analysis, and countering violent extremism. Mary Beth Altier is a clinical associate professor at New York University Center for Global Affairs. She received a PhD in politics from Princeton University in 2011 and worked as a post-doctoral researcher on a UK government and department of Homeland Security-funded study of terrorist disengagement, re-engagement, and recidivism. Dr. Altier is currently working on a book manuscript that examines why citizens support political parties associated with terrorist groups and developed and developing democracies. The manuscript is based on her dissertation, which won the American Political Science Associations Ernst B. Haas Award. And Dr. Altier also received the American Political Science Association's best paper from the European Politics and Society Organized Section in 2015. Her research is published in the Journal of Peace Research, Security Studies, Terrorism, and Political Violence, Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, and Journal of Strategic Study, Strategic Security. And she sits on the editorial board of Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression and Studies and Conflict and Terrorism. This afternoon, we will begin with an introduction to JM's newest work, Extremism, which will be followed by a response by Mary Beth, and then we will follow with an exciting discussion, and we'll save the last 30 minutes or so for audience questions. And so with that said, we'll begin with JM. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you, New America, for having me. I am pretty excited to talk about the book. This book is something that's been, I've been turning around in my head for a long time, and it is designed for three audiences. So first, it's an introduction to extremism for somebody who's completely new to the topic. We don't really have something that's super accessible in that space, so this is sort of aims to address that gap. The second group is the academic group. Academic audience and policy audience, there's something that we struggle with when we're working on extremism and countering extremism is defining our terms in a way that is useful for programs, for research. So that's sort of the second tier audience, and the third tier audience, I think, is practitioners. So we really, one thing that I have been very pleased in the course of talking about the book and traveling around a little bit to do some events related to it is that people who are working on CVE programs as practitioners are finding this helpful. It gives them some tools to talk about some of the things they need to be able to talk about. So with all that said, I am going to try and give you a very quick overview of some of these key issues, these definitional issues. So I may be flying through the slides pretty quickly, depending on how long I end up talking, but all of the stuff is in the book which is available for sale, I believe, here, and the book is short, so it is not a huge investment of your time to get this. It'll take you a little longer than the PowerPoint, but not a lot longer. So when I started thinking about how to talk about this, the reference that really spoke to me on this was from a Supreme Court opinion on pornography from the 1960s, and there was a case before the court where they were asked to rule whether something was obscene or not. And Genesis Potter Stewart said, in a very famous concurring opinion, I can't define what pornography is, but I know it when I see it. And that's the problem we have with extremism right now. And it's a big problem because the word is very convenient to talk about your political enemies, to talk about people who are different from you or strange to you. Extremists use the word to talk about other people who are not extremists in some cases. In some cases they talk about people who are extremists. So if we can't define it, we have a variety of problems, especially when, as an international community, we're devoting tremendous amount of resources to countering violent extremism, countering extremism. So what I wanted to do in the book is really sort of get at this problem. So some people we all agree are extremists, right? So neo-Nazis, ISIS, those are kind of the easy calls. Everybody's like, yes, we've got that. Then you have people who are more ambiguous. So this is just a selection of three cases that I look at in the book. Pope Innocent III, who led what's called the Albigensian Crusade, which was essentially a genocide against a Christian sect known as the Cathars in the Middle Ages. Cortez, who was the leader of the conquistadors who had an ideological platform which allowed them to carry out the biggest genocide in history. And Edmund Ruffin, who was known as one of the fire eaters, who was one of the pro-slavery ideologs during the Civil War. And all of these figures are in some ways very similar to a group like ISIS or the Nazis. They have identifiable similarities, but we don't talk about them when we talk about this problem. And in fact, I mean, when I've written about this in peer reviews, I will get people to push back on me and say, you can't say that this person's extremist. They represent the mainstream of society. They remember us and the morals of the time. And I think it's important to start thinking about this in a way that gets out of the jihadist neo-Nazi box. Extremism is made up of components. We've got a lot of different pieces of extremist movements. And what we find when you do comparative study of extremist movements, when you're not just somebody who's concerned with al-Qaeda, you're not just somebody who's concerned with neo-Nazis, you can start to identify the ways that these groups are similar to each other in order to understand what it is when we use the word extremism, what do we mean by it? So the two biggest problems that I have with the current lack of consensus on extremism comes with these sort of default positions that when you don't have a well-articulated definition, these become sort of the default beliefs. So one is the idea that extremism, the dictionary definition, extremism is being extreme. It's like this circular definition. It's relative to the center of society. And for me, if you have a definition of extremism that doesn't include the Nazis, then you need to rethink that definition. So the Nazis were in the mainstream of German society for a couple of decades, and we need to be able to talk about how a group like that is similar to a group like ISIS, even when it's the group in power, even when it is in the center of society, because there are similarities there. The second issue that comes up frequently is too much concern with violence. So there's a whole host of behaviors, which I'll be talking about, that are identifiably extremist, that we understand to be extremist, but they're not physical violence in the sense of being terrorism. So they're structural violence or psychic violence, or they're non-violent in very limited contexts. We talk about harassment. If you all write harassment of people online is obviously extremist in nature, but they're not killing anybody. So we need to get past thinking about countering violent extremism as just about violence and think about other kinds of behaviors. So to build the definition, there's a couple of quick concepts that are probably familiar to anybody who actually showed up for this lecture, but I will quickly go over it anyway. The in-group. So the in-group is the group to which you belong. It doesn't necessarily mean popular group or the powerful group. It's just your group. And the out-group is the people who you exclude from your group. So if you are a white supremacist, your in-group is white people and your out-group is anybody who's not white according to your definition, which we'll get to. And then an extremist ideology. So ideology is a word that is often treated as magic formula for turning people into mindless killers. And the way I define it here is that it's really a collection of texts that describe who's in the in-group, who's in the out-group, and how those groups should relate to each other. So using the building off of this, the definition of extremism that I put forward in the book and there's a more robust defense of this because it's a new definition. It's not something that we've really has had any kind of consensus behind it. We don't have a consensus on this. It's just one reason for writing the book. I define extremism as the belief that an in-group's success can never be separated from taking hostile action against an out-group. So your in-group, you define the success of your in-group by its hostile actions against an out-group, by its suppression against the out-group. So you can't be a white person who's fine being white, even though a lot of extremists will use that rhetoric disingenuously. They have to, it has to be in the context of suppressing or excluding or, in some cases, killing another group. Violent extremism is the same thing except with violence and we'll talk about that little spectrum there. But really the key thing is, I think of as inseparability, you cannot, if you cannot separate your group's success from another group's failure or subjugation, then you're an extremist. And then radicalization is a term that also suffers from a lack of consensus and we get into this a lot. It's basically the escalation of an extremist orientation by adopting more negative views about the out-group or endorsing increasingly harmful actions against the out-group. So it's not necessarily a mysterious quantity here. So there are three big categories that make up an extremist ideology and then there are subcategories under each of these. So the first is identity. So you have to have the in-groups and the out-groups and there are some iterations of the in-group and out-group concept that are important. The second is a crisis. So a crisis is usually something bad that's happening to the in-group that the extremists think is being caused by the out-group. But it can really, a crisis is a turning point or a decision moment. So sometimes you can have a triumphalist crisis as you see sort of with Nazis, the rise of Nazis. Even though the Nazis took political power able to implement their program, it didn't stop them from seeing a crisis. Instead, the crisis changed from we are the suffering victims to we are the victors and now we have to do this to ensure our victory. So crisis isn't always a bad event happening to the in-group but it's always a moment of important historical impact. And then there's a solution. And so the solution is the hostile actions that an extremist group stipulates in order to take action against the out-group. So this chart is based on both my work and the work of Dr. Haroro Ingram who is with GWU's program on extremism. He and I wrote a series of papers for ICCT, the International Center for Counterterrorism and the Hague in which we iterated through a couple of ideas that each of us had on these concepts and he put out a slightly simpler version of this graphic that I've made one change to in terms of breaking the in-group into two pieces. So according to Dr. Ingram, the extremist system of meaning is predicated on the belief that the out-group is creating a crisis that is affecting the in-group and so the in-group has to solve that crisis by taking hostile action against the out-group. And what I've done is add one little complication to that which is I've split the in-group into two pieces. So there are two kinds of in-groups for an extremist group. There's the eligible in-group which is the identity that an extremist group appeals to and then there's the extremist in-group which is an actual extremist movement or organization. And so for instance, for ISIS, the eligible in-group would be Sunni Muslims. That's who they want to join. So in this chart, in this stipulation, to get to the solution to the crisis, you have to join the extremist in-group. You have to be part of the eligible in-group who joins the extremist in-group. And I think about this as a value proposition. It's the argument that extremists make in order to convince you to join the movement. So crisis has to be stipulated and there are a couple of major kinds of crisis that everybody talks about. In extremist movements, these are covered, most of the material that I've reviewed so far might add a few to this list before I get done with my dissertation. But for now, these are, as I see it, the major kinds of crisis that you see in an extremist movement. So purity or an impurity is something that is often at the beginning of an extremist movement or in a pre-violent stage of an extremist movement although it can carry through to great violence. The crisis that an extremist group stipulates in this case would be arguing that the out-group is corrupting our in-group in some way. So for white supremacists, that's race mixing. So if you have an interracial relationship, you're corrupting the purity of the white race by producing children who are multiracial. Conspiracy, so the best known example of this would be the protocols of the learned elders of Zion which is the basis for a lot of anti-semitic extremist movements. The conspiracy stipulates that the out-group is secretly controlling outcomes for the in-group through whatever secretive means. Dystopia, so in a dystopian kind of crisis such as you would see in a white nationalist book like the Turner Diaries, which is a dystopian novel, the out-groups successfully take control of society and orient it against the in-group. So in the Turner Diaries, the story which a lot of white nationalists believe is a prophecy of things to come is that blacks and Jews have taken over the government and the first thing they do is take all the guns away from the white people and that's that dystopia but dystopian narratives can be much more sophisticated than that, that's a very blunt instrument, that book. Existential, so that's a simple threat. The out-group is going to kill all of us. They're gonna wipe us out, they're gonna change our way of life. And then apocalyptic, so in an apocalyptic crisis the out-group is not just threatening the in-group but it's threatening everything, the entire world, history. They're gonna bring about the end of history. And an apocalyptic narrative will usually end with the in-group on top but it has to go through some kind of cosmic war to get there. So once the extremist group stipulates one of these crises, then it has to come up with a solution and you can kind of make this into, this is a project I'm working on, I'm not gonna have a slide on it, but you can kind of make a matrix of these, right? So the types of crises by severity and the types of solution that are proposed, the solution is not always proportioned to the crisis. So groups move through a lot of different justifications for action and some of my future research I'm gonna be sort of trying to explore how those things relate, how the type of crisis relates to the type of action that's being taken. But I deliberately expanded the realm of hostile actions that we're talking about because again, I think that we're too focused on violence. There's a lot of ways that this plays out and we often don't talk about extremist movements that are in a pre-violent phase until suddenly one day they're violent and then we've got a big problem. So the hostile actions that an extremist movement will stipulate have to be taken against the outgroup can range from harassment which is just making outgroups unwelcome around the ingroup, discrimination which is systematically denying benefits to members of the outgroup that are available to the ingroup, segregation. So that's voluntary or you can be voluntary, voluntary, right? So you can have voluntary segregation, bunch of people, a bunch of white people moved to Idaho to Cordelean and set up a compound there but the issue with segregation is that eventually it has to be enforced. Eventually somebody's gonna show up and wanna move to Cordelean and somebody's gonna have to respond to that. Hate crimes, so hate crimes are non-systematic violence by ingroup members against outgroups. So the way I see it and there's some room for debate around this, you can have a hate crime that is not ideological that is somebody who's just bigoted or lives in a scenario where they're bigoted and they're in a bar and they get drunk and they attack somebody who's of a different race and shout epithets at them but you don't go to their house and find the Turner Diaries and Hitler's speeches and stuff on the wall. A lot of hate crimes are ideological and we're only sort of just, some people are only just sort of getting into researching this question and trying to look at hate crimes and say how much are these informed by ideological influences? We really don't know. Terrorism, so terrorism's kind of an easy one. That's how we got here. That's why we're all sitting here, more or less. Terrorism is very convenient for extremist groups because it is symbolic and it sort of wends itself to these ingroup outgroup narratives and I had a conversation with somebody about this. I said in the book that terrorism is not necessarily always extremist and that's a very hypothetical kind of statement because a lot, almost all of the terrorism we see tends to have an extremist element but you can kind of maybe do a thought experiment where you come up with a scenario that it doesn't. Oppression is aggressive systematic discrimination so you move from simple issues, simple kinds of discrimination like economic patterns and discrimination in lending choices to oppression which is aggressive discrimination where you can't own property if you're in a certain group. War and insurgency, so you get into really open lethal fighting and not all wars are extremist is I think important to note. A lot of wars, when war is about an objective that can be settled, it's about a strategic or other kind of objective where it's not unconditional about the group of people then it's not extremist and as we were talking before we came out here, there are some gray areas in this definition and I'm sure somebody will throw a couple out maybe when we get to the Q and A and what I've tried to do is reduce the gray areas as much as possible but definitely not eliminated them so some questions around war will be in that space and then finally the most extreme solution is genocide so that's the wholesale spotter the complete elimination of the outgroup through violence. So when we talk about radicalization what we're really talking about is moving on this spectrum of hostile beliefs, hostile actions against the outgroup and belief in the crisis and you're really scaling it up and down. Extremist belief is a spectrum some kinds of extremism are relatively minor and some are relatively severe and radicalization is your movement up that spectrum and deradicalization is your movement down that spectrum and one thing that I don't think we fully appreciate is how to deal with groups that are incrementally deradicalizing so if you look at HTS for instance in Syria group splits with al-Qaeda it tries to do some, it moves in a somewhat more moderate direction but it's still not at all moderate and we don't have any kind of mechanism to sort of understand and incentivize groups that are taking incremental steps steps that are not good enough to satisfy our criteria for inclusion in regular politics but are better than the alternative which is dial it up to 11 and turn it to ISIS. So there's a lot of think of room to talk about this and I think the movement on this spectrum really takes place over issues of legitimacy. Legitimacy is the belief that your in-group has a right to exist and prosper. Everybody wants legitimacy, all kinds of in-groups. Not all in-groups are extremists. Everybody wants legitimacy for themselves and for the people they love and for an extremist movement the in-groups legitimacy has to come at the expense of the out-group. So when extremist movements experience a challenge to legitimacy is when their ideology will change and in some cases, relatively few cases, they will step back, they will moderate somewhat and they will take a less extreme position. They will prescribe less violent action or they will soften their out-group definition. In a lot of cases what happens is when you see a movement gets its legitimacy challenge it will become more extreme. So this becomes very relevant when we look at something like ISIS today. ISIS has lost its territorial claim on the caliphate. That's a huge challenge to its legitimacy and the organization itself is still significant, has significant numbers, has significant followers. So in order to cope with the challenge to legitimacy, ISIS is likely, and in fact in the process we can see of becoming more extreme. So you can sort of say how can ISIS be more extreme, right, they're already the most extreme thing we've got going right now. And they can become more extreme by targeting, in this case, what they're doing is they're targeting more of the eligible in-group. So people who are in the eligible in-group, Sunni Muslims, are invited to join ISIS and what we're seeing now is that when they declared the caliphate they made it an obligation. So it wasn't just that the eligible in-group was invited to join the extremist in-group as with al-Qaeda, they were obligated to join. And so now in the post-territorial phase what we're seeing is a big debate over something called chain-tech fear, which I'm running out of time so I'm not gonna get into it. But essentially it's classifying larger and larger, any Muslims who did not support ISIS are now going into the out-group. So the eligible in-group is shrinking, the out-group is getting bigger and what we're seeing is this is gonna flare up in more violence properly against Sunni Muslims in the short-term future and you can see a lot of the ideological conversations happening, Cole Bunzel and Hassan Hassan have written a lot about that and I highly recommend their work. So I'm going to stop and turn it over to Merida. Right, so thank you. I wanted to thank New America for inviting me to speak and I wanted to commend JM on an excellent book. So if you haven't read it, buy it and read it. It is a quick read, it's a good read. So when I teach master's students in my terrorism course about extremism, I often discuss how the term is poorly defined, extreme in what sense or on what issues. Further as JM notes, ideas that are extreme in one society or context are the norm in others. JM's new tour de force provides a way of circumventing such problems by offering an overarching definition of extremism and radicalization that fits groups from the KKK to the IRA. So rather than rehashing what he's already so eloquently covered, I thought I'd discuss three issues or three questions that I had as I read the book and things that actually he raised as potential issues for further study in the book. So the first is the relationship between extremism and violence, which is actually the title of this lecture, I think. The second is what causes radicalization on mass. That is, when do we see the widespread adoption of extremist ideologies? And the third is whether extremist violence is sometimes a necessary evil. So first, on the relationship between adoption of an extremist ideology and violence, as JM rightly notes in his book, the emphasis of CVE and PVE should be on mitigating hostile activity rather than attacking the legitimacy of extremist groups. The latter, he argues, right, is likely to fail because direct attacks reinforce the notion that extreme measures are required to protect the group. Another reason why we may wanna focus on mitigating hostile activity rather than challenging extremist beliefs is that radicalization is only one explanation of why individuals engage in extremist violence. Many engage in such acts for notoriety, financial gain, or because of the social bonds or sense of purpose involvement provides. Their commitment to the ideology is thus often superficial or shallow. Many only come to believe deeply in the ideology once they are involved in already engaging in acts of violence. Further in interviews I've conducted with violent extremists, those individuals sometimes most likely to escalate their use of violence are those least committed to the ideology. So rather than escalating their use of violence to solve the existential crisis, they're actually engaging in violence to demonstrate their commitment to the group or the cause so they can allay suspicion of other group members and reap other tangible benefits that involvement provides. So in fact, in research I've conducted with Emma Leonard Boyle and John Horgan, we've actually found that deradicalization is not a common cause of terrorist disengagement. So in our data, deradicalization, and I can talk more about the data afterwards if you like, but deradicalization played a pivotal role in explaining disengagement in only 16% of cases. So thus, as J.M. argues, it's possible to mitigate violent hostile activity without necessarily changing beliefs. Some individuals engaged in violent extremism are deeply disillusioned with the extremist ideology or movement, but remain involved because of the sunk costs associated with involvement and a lack of alternatives. That said, and this is very important, our research also shows that extremist beliefs are one of the strongest predictors of terrorist re-engagement and recidivism. So while they don't always play a crucial role in disengagement, they are a very strong predictor of re-engagement. And that's even when controlling for connections to individuals in terrorism, employment, marital and parental status. So in our data, which covers a range of terrorist groups, the re-engagement rate for voluntarily disengaged terrorists, so these are people who left on their own, not people coming out of prison who are under surveillance and other things. So it's 23% re-engagement rate for those who had no radical beliefs, 38% for those who held some radical beliefs, and actually 77% for those who retained strong radical beliefs. So that's why loss of faith and extremist ideology does not explain why most would abandon violence, specifically terrorist violence. It does serve as an important and perhaps the most important risk factor for the return to violence. The second topic that I wanted to cover is what causes radicalization on mass or what JM terms significant extremist movements. And I'm not gonna be able to cover that all here, but just a couple points to note. So in the book, JM rightly notes that terrorism mobilizes supporters and sympathizers. However, I would add that that actually often depends to a large extent on how states respond to that violence. So certain state actions feed extremism by contributing to the perception of a crisis and creating the demand for hostile action. And perhaps the greatest crisis I've seen in my research is the failure of a state to uphold the social contract. So in my own research on provisional sinfame, the provisional IRA's political wing, one factor that constantly generated an increase in support for the party locally with state and sectarian violence against Catholic civilians. Such violence, I argue, created or exacerbated insecurities, or what I noticed in the book is also termed a dramatic uncertainty for these people. And it led citizens to extricate themselves from the state and support violent extremism. Another driver of support for the party is the solution to the crisis that the provisional IRA was able to provide through the protection of the Catholic community, use of vigilante violence, and its brokerage of services. So when interviewing one member of the provisional IRA, he commented on the role of state violence in resulting uncertainties and what it caused him to take up arms. And basically he said, if I could be killed for doing nothing, I might as well be killed for doing something. And the third thing that I wanted to talk about, and this is more of a question, maybe something to throw out to the audience, is that extremist violence is often portrayed as something to be combated or a negative force, but is it not sometimes a necessary force? And so we're not talking about the jihadis or the neo-Nazis here, but I'm thinking about minority outgroups, which in certain states, even certain democratic states, turn to violence when political opportunity structures are closed and they have no voice. Such violence ideally results in greater inclusion even though it may not lead to the disintegration of in-group outgroup distinctions or the perception of the need for a hostile, but perhaps nonviolent action. The processes of state consolidation and democratization historically have been inherently violent, if we think about them, featuring violence between in-groups and out-groups and efforts, external efforts, especially to influence those processes or impose them peacefully, usually are unsuccessful. And so this isn't to excuse the actions of individual violent extremists, I'm not trying to do that, but just to simply acknowledge that the drivers of widespread violent extremism may be just as much structural as individual. And certain institutional reforms, policies and political settlements may not mitigate extremism or eliminate all violent extremists, we're still likely to see some, but they may to the extent, sorry, that they undermine this crisis narrative, they may reshape the incentives or rationale for large numbers of individuals to engage in or endorse extremist violence. So, thank you. Thank you, JM and Mary Beth for really engaging first start of our discussion and extremism. And I feel like in a world where definitions are subjective, extremism is a wonderful overview for practitioners and non-practitioners alike, and it can rain from areas of peacebuilding to security and everything in between, so I really commend you for that. It was tremendous to read. And I felt like as a reader, I had many questions that came up as I was reading, and I felt like within 10 to 15 pages you had already answered each question every time, and that's a very difficult thing to do, so I was really impressed by that because I would say, well, what about this scenario? What about this ethnic conflict? What about this? And then all of a sudden by the next chapter, it was already answered. I said, oh, I guess he's got it all covered, so it was tremendous, so thank you. So with that said, I have a number of questions and I know we'll also be taking some questions from the audience, so a concept you speak about early on in the book is in-group versus out-group as you both discussed, and so I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about what does othering and the term of othering play in driving the narratives, which then drives conflict, extremism, and then can lead to violence. So yeah, othering is basically part of the process of identity construction, so any kind of identity movement, you have an identity, whether it's geographic or ethnic or religious, you have to define it in some way, so I use the example in the book of Boston, people who live in Boston, and it's like, okay, well, you live in Boston, that's like, that makes you a Bostonian, but then you start to elaborate on that definition of, well, you have to use certain kinds of words and you have to root for a certain sports team and you layer on details to that, so what happens in an extremist movement is that the boundaries between the in-group and the out-group start to become very rigid and you have to define each different types of extremism have different sort of what I call tractability about the in-group, out-group definition, but they're all really important, so racial extremists have extremely rigid in-group out-group, you are either in the race or you're not, and then you have religious extremists where you're either in the group or you're not, but there's a procedure to join the group, it's a fixed procedure and you can't just negate it, so even ISIS has not said people can't convert to Islam, for instance, and then you have nationalist groups and nationalist groups are all about the definition, entirely focused on the definition, what makes you a part of the nation and what doesn't, and those are very tractable boundaries, but in all these cases you're super fixated on that boundary and in order to have a construct where you can take hostile action against the out-group, you have to have a very clear definition of who's in the group and who's out of the group, and so that's how I would describe othering, I think that's a sort of synonymous take on it. Sounds good. I mean, I guess I could see othering playing an important role in a couple of ways, the one is this notion of zero-sum conflict, so the idea that anything that benefits the out-group harms your group, so when that happens, that sort of reifies your identity, and other is Albert Bandora's theory of dehumanization, so in order to engage against hostile action, to the extent that you perceive the other group as less than human, and I think these ideologies help people actually come to believe that there's something about the other group that makes them less than human, which makes it easier to engage in violence, and then third, one of the things that I've found is that there are often sometimes sort of blurry, there's some tension between individuals that don't necessarily, they're part of an extremist group, but they don't necessarily fit the mold, so I'm thinking of someone who was in a white, sorry, a white wing, far right wing, extremist group with the child of immigrants, and so for him, that caused a lot of tension, or I could think of another person that was in a group whose sexual orientation was not consistent with the ideology of that group, and so for certain individuals, if they don't fit necessarily that eligible in-group fully, but the group still accepts them, that causes some tension, and a lot of times that actually prompts them to leave the group. Well, thank you. Also, Mary Beth, I'm curious if you could respond to this, how important is a central leader to an extremist movement, and then creation, and then sustaining that movement? Yeah, so I mean, I guess in terms of leadership, we've seen a decentralization of terrorist groups, so you would think maybe they've become less important, but one of the things we've actually found in our research is that disillusionment with the leaders I think is one of the most common causes of people leaving the group, and so it's the third most common, a second most common is disillusionment with strategy or actions of the group, which are most commonly put forth by leaders, so to the extent that individuals disagree with the leaders, it's one of the most common drivers of exit from those groups. Yeah, and I just want to say I really recommend Mary Beth's work on disillusionment. I have a huge amount of common ground and sort of my attitudes on this. I think that leadership matters in the same way that competence matters in sort of any kind of organization, so if you have good leaders, they can accomplish more, and if you have bad leaders like Aiman Al-Zawahiri, then you accomplish less, and I think that, and really you can take that all the way up and down the food chain, so if you have, you know, if your mid-level people are good, if what we saw with ISIS is really, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi obviously brings some kind of competence to ISIS to accomplish what he did, but arguably it was the mid-level leadership, the former Bathis and some of the hardened jihadis who joined the group, they arguably are the people who really contributed most to the success of the organization. So yeah, I mean, individuals matter and a charismatic leader who can convey an extremist message is very powerful. One thing that is really key to understand about extremist ideologies is that they're socially transmitted, so a charismatic leader reaches more people socially. They can transmit the ideas more effectively than a non-charismatic idea. That's not the only way the ideas can be transmitted, but it's a very powerful tool for a person. That's great, and in terms of messages, just piggybacking off of what you just said and also a little bit with disengagement, just in terms of narratives and counter-narratives, what makes a narrative or a counter-narrative successful or unsuccessful? Is there a successful one you want to point me to? I think that we have a real problem with assessing how narratives work and how successful they are, and that's an area where I'm not super satisfied with the research on this, and with the practitioner results, we have a lot of people doing work on counter-narratives in the practitioner space who are not the metrics for success are not really well-defined. And I think that for my mind, and this is related to the disengagement work that we've both done, I'm a big fan of sort of negative programming, but like you dissect the extremist ideology and pick it apart, but I think also, and I think if you look at what's happening in the United States and Europe right now, I think that we need to do better job of creating a positive alternative message. So I think you can tactically, in the short term, you can use a lot of these characteristics and approaches that I've written about to dissect what extremists are saying and look for the weak points. See what you can do to, for instance, to weaken the boundary between in-group and out-group. If you can blur that, or if you can diffuse the crisis, these are approaches I think could be valuable, but I don't think we have a real good basis for arguing extensively about what works and what doesn't. Yeah, I mean, Kurt's in the audience, and so he's pretty well-versed in counter-narratives. So if you wanna, he's our expert here. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I think the best counter-narratives, and I said this before, I mean, I think are organic ones. So just even things like being the best United States we can be, or being the best UN we can be, not sort of forced messaging. But I do think if you're going to go down that route, I mean, there are things, most people actually disengage from terrorism because of very mundane things, disagreements with other members, things like that, or just pointing out, we talked about leadership, pointing out that leaders are not living in the ideology. There are sort of tensions there, but I still think the best narratives are organic ones. So I think when it comes to message points and like CVE, PVE, different, I guess, tactics to combat the same thing, even in the US, we often focus on the idea of root causes and not so much focusing on identity of either a group or an individual. I'm just wondering if we could talk a little bit about that and why, in terms of policy, why it always goes back to trying to define with a root cause and what makes that problematic. Well, policy makers like easy answers. There's a real fixation on a lot of stuff that has been pretty conclusively disproven as far as causes of extremism, such as poverty, lack of education, all the stuff is like, the research says it doesn't matter. I think that where I talked about in the book and I ran out of time before I got to the slide on this, but there's a field of study in this area called Uncertainty Identity Theory and System Justification Theory. These are two social psychology theories that I think are really useful in trying to find a frame and what they basically taken together, what they argue is that situations where people experience great uncertainty or the status quo is being upset in a dramatic way are more prone to accept extremist ideas, to adopt extremist ideas. And so I think we can rehabilitate some of the, like the Obama era development aid programs in that context by, if they're addressing uncertainty. And that's what I think, the problem is that I think that a lot of these programs have one-size-fits-all kind of, well, we're just gonna go in and get everybody a college education and a job and that's not the right solution for everyone. So it's not necessarily that there's unemployment where you are, but maybe if there was a dramatic change in the employment sector, people became suddenly poorer or if you look at Saudi Arabia, if you suddenly become rich, that also creates uncertainty that can lead people to adopt more. Yeah, I mean, I think addressing, I think that's, I actually found that really, that really resonated with me in your book. So this idea of addressing the crisis for that individual, whatever that crisis may be or for the society. I also think sometimes CB and PB programming doesn't necessarily always legitimate grievances even if they're real. So sometimes people do have really legitimate grievances and we think about people living under a sod or something like that. And so I think maybe acknowledging that the grievances are there and that there is a crisis of some sort, but then just finding ways to steer, either to remedy the crisis or steer people away from the hostile activity. Thank you. Turning a little bit towards what we're gonna see in the future and just technology-wise, I had a couple of questions I was hoping we could talk through. So in terms of the spread of information technology, is it safer or more harmful in a world where you have issues like the WhatsApp killings in India and false news and false information spreading? So what does that mean for us as we move forward with these types of issues? So there's two pieces of this. I mean, the first is because extremist ideologies are socially transmitted, the more channels you have and the less regulated those channels are, the more opportunity you have for a movement to spread, which is a big contributor to what we're seeing right now. The second is that this identity construction process, how that works is that you pick and choose data points from the world of information in order to find the ones that support your identity construction and your crisis definition. And so the more technology is available, the more information is available, easily available and the less reliable that information is, the easier it is to build those identity constructions. Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything. I mean, I think it's a fundamental issue. I'm not just for violent extremism, but just for everything that's going on in the world right now. And I think we need to be sort of more in tune in how we, I think, educate socially children, young people about how they access information and the veracity of that information. And it makes it problematic as we try to figure out if we're going in the route of trying to have more, I guess, alternate narratives and something more positive, at least, from message points for as we go on. And technology is a way to spread that message more easily, but what do you do when we're trying to combat what's real, what's not, and what that can do when transmitting and especially encrypted messages to try and get to the root of things. It's hard to manage that. Yeah, I mean, the current environment favors bad actors. You know, what we had for up until really the 1990s was a very centralized media apparatus that was very pro-social. And I'm talking about in America primarily, but also in Europe and in other countries. The Klan couldn't buy a national news network, and now they can get on social media and reach an audience of comparable size. So what we're seeing is a huge explosion into that space from extremist movements and that social media right now is advantaging extremist groups in a way that is not advantaging centrist or not extremist movements. And with that said, we were joking a little bit about this before, but what is the most dangerous technology tool that could either spread extremism or, oh, I guess, yes, just to spread extremism? I'll say my gut reaction when she posed this question was drone, but yeah. Yeah, so it depends on how you define dangerous. So if you define the tool that's most likely to make people the most radical, then I would say the drone. And if it's the tool that's likely to make most people radical, then I would say it's social media. And just something a little bit that you talked about towards the end is kind of cataclysmic events. I'm wondering, in terms of climate change and kind of forced migration, just what is the role of climate change in creating new extremist movements and do you see something developing within the next few decades or ways to approach how to manage that before it starts? Well, I think that the big issue is gonna be that it's gonna create massive uncertainty. People are, as you said, it's gonna be, people are gonna have to move, they're gonna have to abandon their homes, industries are gonna have to change, cities are gonna have to change. These things may or may not happen in, well, my lifetime, they might happen in your lifetime, but these are gonna be issues that come up in the future when people, I think that, I don't wanna be absolute about this because extremists are very creative, but I think that probably blaming people for climate change isn't gonna be so much of an issue as responding to how people have to relocate and how groups are thrown into uncertain situations where an identity group is suddenly moving en masse into your neighborhood. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's definitely what we call the threat multiplier. And I think with these population flows, you're going to have more in-group, out-group, othering, especially in developing countries that don't have the resources to adapt immigrant and refugee populations. You're gonna see more immigrant-native conflict. I also think you may have whole nations that are sinking, may go away. And so they've actually bought pieces of territory in other countries. And so the question is, if you move your whole nation to another country, what is, what are you now? Are you still a nation? Are you part of that nation? And so there are huge, huge issues and very little on the legal status of these public climate refugees. And then identity, and what does it mean when you have to be forced into maybe a new identity or going into an area that has a very specific identity and trying to manage that new way of kind of viewing yourself and your family and your community, so. Yeah, I mean, when you have a situation where there's a sudden new identity in town, you know, and you can argue, I think, probably that sort of gradualism on this, when you see, like, if you look at urban centers in a lot of countries, gradual demographic change is something that gives you enough time to process it and people don't feel as threatened in their identity group, whereas sudden demographic change is, if New York City floods and all the New Yorkers move to Montana, then you're gonna have a big problem. I think, too, a lot of economic uncertainty, right? It's, I mean, you know, certain crops are no longer viable, et cetera, et cetera, like thinking about things that could cause a potential economic crisis and that kind of thing. Yeah, and also, it's a problem without an obvious solution, and so that's inherently uncertain, and that creates a lot of anxiety and people will feel challenged to come up with solutions, extreme solutions. Well, I'd really like to throw some questions to the audience and we'll have our mic coming in just a moment and we can take the first one here and then, David, maybe we could ask two at once if that would be okay. Thank you, Catherine. Also, if we have some time, I would like to talk about the questions that Mary Ness brought up and cause I think they were really interesting. I'd love to hear you talk to them. It was spurred by your books. Would you characterize your approach as a behavioral psychology approach or an organizational dynamics approach? To what extent is it individuals and what extent is it a collective group response? So, right now, the book is basically a social psychology book and there is some discussion of the individual level but it's more concerned with sort of the group and shape of the groups and how the ideology develops and this is actually, I'll use this to jump into the question of how violence relates to extremist ideologies. What we find is really that how an extremist ideology settles in with different people are always, there's a huge amount of variation. It's very hard to make generalizations. It's very hard to sort of put on a pattern but what we can say about how extremist ideologies interact with individual actions is that extremist ideologies shape the kind of violence that people take part in. So, we don't even know for sure really in a super rigorous way whether extremist ideologies cause more violence than would exist otherwise in society but it shapes that violence and it shapes that violence in a direction that has political impact. So, when I think about how, you know, ideology relates to violence, that's really how I think about it. Can we take one more question and we'll ask, again, Mary Beth's great questions from her presentation. David, right here. Thank you. Thanks. David Sturman here with New America. I wanted to actually pull you into the third question about whether sometimes extremist ideologies are moral and correct or necessary and I'd like to push you to sort of address it not on the sort of structural question of sometimes does resolving agree events solve the issue but within your framework, is there a value in analyzing movements we might consider good as extremist movements using your definition and I'll throw you two examples. The first is the abolitionist movement which I think probably fits pretty well within many of your frameworks. You have sort of terrorism at Harper's Ferry. You have sort of a desire for the Civil War which was pretty disastrous. I think most of us would say the destruction of the outgroup, the slaveholding class was necessary and good. And then I want to ask you related about Antifa which the sort of, I guess, ideology trend not an organization tends to do or definitionally says that there's no space for fascism and outgroup within our society and how do you wrestle with those? Thanks. Thank you and just say David and Nate Rosenblatt have done a lot of great work that's sort of demolished some of the mythology of what causes extremism in different areas. I think that, so I would argue that abolitionists were opposed to the practice of slavery and that they did not seek to destroy the slave owners but they did seek to stop them from practicing slavery. So I think like abolitionists and suffragettes, for instance, they're trying to achieve a specific political change and I think if you have a end game where you can say, look, we can do this and then we're acceptable and then the hostile action stops short of annihilation of the outgroup. So I mean, I can see how you could frame it as the outgroup is slaveholders but I would argue that what they were opposing was the practice of slavery and there were some extremist currents certainly in that but I'm not sure I would call them extremist movement. With Antifa is one of the gray areas that immediately comes up after somebody reads a book, right? So if you're an extremist, if your outgroup is another extremist movement, does that make you an extremist movement? If you say that outgroup always has to be fought and so I was pretty happy with how far I was able to reduce the number of gray areas but I was not able to completely eliminate them. It's tricky. One issue, I tried to make, I tried to structure these framework so that it doesn't have to answer the question of objective truth. So it doesn't have to answer whether the outgroup is a genuine threat or not. It's more about how the ingroup positions against the outgroup. But in the case of Antifa, if you're defining the outgroup as fascist, you can make an argument for the objective truth that fascists are bad and should be opposed because they are extremists in themselves. Ultimately what you see and what I think there have been a lot of concerns expressed about Antifa in the current environment, I think so far those concerns have largely been overstated. But what you can see around certain edges and areas in the movement is that they're in this process of redefining the ingroup and the outgroup and that's a really dangerous moment for extremist groups is when they're changing their definition. So instead of Antifa 10 years ago primarily focused on people on stormfront neo-Nazis, people who are very explicitly associated with the extremist group and now there's a discussion about is it just them or is it the alt-right or is it just the alt-right? Is it Trump voters? Is it all Republicans? Is it who's our outgroup? And so that's a dangerous period and a group I think that is defined in relation to an outgroup primarily in relation to a specific outgroup is always at risk of moving into extremism even if it's kind of a gray area whether it's there right now. And Mary Beth, in terms of some of the questions that you had asked, is there any other follow-up to some that you posed? Well I guess I have a question about like so I really struggle when I'm reading this like I have Northern Ireland in the case I know best and so just thinking about Catholics and Protestants and you know just talking with them even last summer paramilitaries or former paramilitaries like some of these things I don't know how you categorize them because we were talking earlier they are in this peace process neither group has achieved what they wanted, right? But you know some of the things that they're still taking hostile action you still have narratives of impurity, dystopia, harassment, discrimination and so I guess I would just be curious as to how you classify them are they gray? How should I think about them? Make it easy for me. So I don't know them well enough to make it easy for you so your subject matter expertise puts you in a better position to assess but what I would say is one thing that I look at and think about in terms of whether something is extremist or not is whether there's a settlement you know whether there's a prospect for a settlement of the grievance so this is where you get into a group like Hamas for instance where in some ways you can argue that Hamas would be able to reach a settlement of an agreement except for its foundational statement that Israel must be destroyed. So you know when you look at the question of are we trying to resolve a transient political situation or do we believe that the outgroup by its nature must be eliminated? So what I'm not sure about in the context in the specific context that you're talking about is there a prospect? I mean it seems like we've certainly moved toward So there's a settlement but people aren't happy with it. You have a settlement but no one's happy with it and so there's still these sort of lingering ideas of well there's definitely an outgroup there's no intermarriage or nothing like that and there's still this idea that we need to take hostile action because we've reached a settlement but it's not the settlement we want. And so for me it's a little bit tricky. I mean it seems to fit your definitional criteria I was trying to go through it very meticulously and I kept going back to the definition. So there's a settlement but again we still see all of the impurity, the dystopia, harassment, discrimination not necessarily violence I mean there are a couple fringe violent groups but not mainstream so maybe. One thing I think that I try to sort of set the stage for in talking about this is talking about movements that are extremist but not necessarily super problematic. You know, if we think of this as an as a spectrum there are groups that are extremist that can be managed where you can reduce the negative impact that they have where you should be thinking about the group and sort of you know like if you want to take an analog kind of thing in jihadism it would be like Salafis do we, how do we treat them? They're less problematic but they certainly have elements that fit this criteria so you know overall I think we're an area where we've done terrible job in this field is understanding the relationship between less extreme and more extreme movements. So I mean you know 10 years ago we were all talking about the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda and how the Muslim Brotherhood is obviously the cause of al-Qaeda and completely you know they're in league and they're the same thing and we gotta do this and now nobody's talking about the Muslim Brotherhood. There's obviously a relation between those groups because people in al-Qaeda came out of that background that Uber and a lot of stuff in Muslim Brotherhood it's not a static thing it's had a lot of different beliefs over the years at different points it certainly has had more extreme views and then at other points it's had less extreme views. It probably you know you can ask whether it ever completely graduated out of being extremist or not but certainly the severity of the group and how problematic it is has changed over the years. And I think that's important, I think that's an important point you raised earlier about HTS so this idea that you know even if they have these sort of extreme ideologies but sometimes you can bring them to a settlement that kind of manages the problem so we don't necessarily have to infer just because they have such an extreme ideology that we can't kind of assuage something and make things a little bit better. Yeah I think we have a very sort of constitutional cosmic foundational issue with the war on terror in this respect is that we don't really have a system to incentivize groups to become less problematic. So you know right now it's like an all or nothing has elements of extreme response to extremism in itself. If a group is going to be less problematic when we should think about changing our posture toward it and this is HTS is just with the formal break from Al Qaeda is kind of the easiest case to sort of look at and say do we really need to change our posture or our attitude about this group or should we continue to view it as a threat to Western national security. But you can really look at all the Al Qaeda affiliates now and I would argue somewhat controversially maybe that there's no, the idea of a global Al Qaeda seems to be at least in hibernation if not completely dead. What we have are a bunch of groups that have similar ideologies that are fighting almost exclusively local conflicts and they're not really engaging in this global jihad anymore. So they are less problematic than they were for Western national security. They are very problematic where you live and who the stakeholders are and what action you should take about each of these groups and you know it gets super complicated very fast but you know I guess I think it would be helpful if we had more of a ability to have a nuanced discussion about how we interact with each of these separately rather than treating it as all one big problem. That's an excellent point of view and it's hard because you wanna have some sort of national policy on how to manage these different groups that might have some underlying similar traits when they began but as you know fractions develop what are you supposed to do as a result and so that's a real tricky thing for any administration to try and manage. Do we have some other questions? Can we start on this side please? What we talk, what Jim's saying, when we talk about movements are we talking about a world where it's easier for small movements to be more dangerous or is it easier to create large dangerous movements? I would say both of those, definitely. Technology, not now talking about cell phones but more about bombs and the like. It's easier to kill more people for one person to kill more people than it ever has been before whether it's because of weapons availability or urban density or for a variety of reasons. So small movements, I mean and really ISIS when you look at it on a global scale ISIS is a very small movement but it's incredibly disruptive because it was able to exploit technological changes and also to really have a huge political impact. So at the same time you also have the ability for movement to spread and so they're related, right? So even though ISIS is very small and sort of like as a percentage of the world population the people who are in ISIS are able to, who are amenable to ISIS's message susceptible to it. We're able to find each other and coordinate their activity thanks to technological changes in a way that was almost unimaginable 20 years ago and so they can magnify the disruption they have. So they're able to spread very quickly but they're also able to maximize the relatively small numbers you have in any group. Yeah, I mean I don't think you should discount small movements. It doesn't take a lot of money it doesn't take a lot of people to carry out a large scale terrorist attack. So even about 9-11 for instance, huge. Colonel Dan Braden, U.S. Army. Two questions, I think it's laudable to try to define a word like extremism so it can be used practically because it's certainly one of those words that is weaponized by members of in and out groups, right? Kind of like the sociological equivalent of cult, right? For religious organizations because it's weaponized and so it's hard to define really what it is without being relative in its use. Can you talk about the maybe the crux of defining the ones that nation states for instance should act on or focus on are the ones that specifically take the attitude as part of their general principles of dehumanization of the other and that maybe that's a differentiating factor for policy makers, for leaders in deciding which are true extremists and which are really just working from a logical principle that may just be a disagreement, a rational disagreement that eventually could escalate to violence because certainly in your definition I think you'd apply that to our founding fathers in the United States of America. They were certainly extremists. They didn't argue that Britain should be destroyed. Exactly, so they didn't dehumanize, right? They didn't dehumanize their enemies, although they probably there's some tongue and cheek stuff in the literature about what they said about the king and that sort of thing. But can you talk a little bit about that and trying to differentiate so that it's practical and that we can get to logic and reason and application really from a more objective perspective? Yeah, I mean that's a big issue that I was hoping to address with us. And in terms of how you actually take that and apply it in the practical world I keep trying to come up with like a matrix or two by two or something and what I end up is always like a cube or a hypercube or something. I think it's possible and some of the work I'm gonna be doing on my dissertation is going to sort of aim at being able to sort of quantify some of this stuff in a better way. And there's two elements. One is a movement extremist. Is it a true extremist movement? And then the other is whether it should be dealt with in the harsh manner. It's like basically how problematic is it? So some extremist movements are like the Westboro Catholic, Westboro Baptist Church is obviously an extremist movement. It is extremely disruptive and generates a lot of media. It's ugly and unpleasant but we're not sending the National Guard in to round them up. So there's a sort of mix of how extreme the movement is whether it is genuinely extremist movement and then what is prescription for action is what its solution is. And I think it's in those two kind of matrixes that I think I would add timeframe of the crisis to that is where I end up going to the third dimension. If they're articulating an extremist movements articulating a far off crisis that someday 300 years from now, there won't be any more white people. That is less urgent and less likely to produce problematic action in the short term, deeply problematic action in the short term. And whereas if you believe that your crisis is here now that there's an apocalypse that's been foretold and everything's gonna happen in the next five years, then you're much more likely to take deeply problematic action. So I think there is definitely, I think this is a step toward putting together an assessment protocol for this and I think I'll be working on that going forward. I think to your point about mitigating hostile action versus really pushing back against the ideology, right? So I mean, hopefully somewhere intelligence agencies and law enforcement are monitoring these individuals somehow and seeing what they're doing. And so when you see that move towards more violent activity, that's when you would sort of, they're on the radar and now they're really problematic. Yeah, and that reminds me of another point that you raised when you were responding is this question of how much the ideology matters to people, so and then I completely agree, even though I just wrote a book about extremist ideology, the way ideology functions for people is much different. So for a lot of people, most adherents, ideology's incorporated by reference. So it's enough to know that there is, you know who the outgroup is, you know where you're supposed to do them. The details, you need to know the details exist. You need to know that there are books and learned scholars who said this and argued this and fleshed out all these definitions and detail. You don't actually necessarily have to read those books. What you see in some, as Christian identity as a white nationalist movement in the United States that developed over a bunch of years and when it really turned toward violence, you had this guy named Wesley Swift who was a radio preacher who really promoted this and what he would do is he'd give these sermons and lectures and he would make reference to the fact that there were all these books that had been written 50 years ago that supported what he said and there's all this stuff he would say. There's all the documents in the British Museum that prove what we believe, but he never explained them and nobody ever came up to him afterward and asked to see the books. So, but the books existed and they did contribute to the police he had. So I think it's a really interesting question and I think, yeah, when we really get into, I think the question is we just, is it better for us as counter-terrorism and CVE professionals to just discourage the behavior, encourage disengagement by, then the framework can help inform this disillusion and disappointment, divide divisions in the movement. I think as civil society, we have to be prepared to push back against extremist movements when they become large. So that's, I think, another piece of this is, I don't think we need to devote a lot of energy to discrediting ISIS's ideology because ISIS's ideology for all that has succeeded has succeeded with a fraction of 1% of its target audience, right? So do we need to defeat ISIS's ideology, not necessarily? Do we need to defeat Victor Urban's ideology? Maybe we should be thinking about that one more because that's like in control of a country and implementing an agenda. So I think that it's easy in the current media environment to see a couple hundred or a couple thousand people adopting a movement and think, oh my God, we gotta do something about this, but it's, you know, there's seven billion people in the world and we're not gonna be able to stop every movement that's 10,000 people. 10,000 people can make a huge problem depending on how they act. But, you know, I think there's a, I think we need to sort of prioritize and also maybe think about how we define the opposite of extremism. I wrote a piece on this for the Aspen Institute recently, you know, what if we're not, if we're against extremism, what are we for? And how do we define that? So. And I think this question just raised, speaks a little bit more to something that you talk about early on in the book and trying to identify content of an extremist group or movement and the structure. So, I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, the book is really about like the structure of a movement. I think we fixate in counter-terrorism and CVE world, we fixate a lot on the contents of the movement. You know, what are the, you know, the words they use and the scriptures they cite and you know, the structure is what unifies it and if you're gonna try and push back against it, you should push back against the structural elements and not try and argue about, even to me, a theological credibility. Yes, come here, come up here please. Hi, my name is Jack Kropansky on Affiliated. How would you, how cleanly does the Taliban fit into your framework? And does your framework tell us, should we worry more about the Taliban off in Afghanistan or the Victor Orbins of the world? Well, that's a good question. So the Taliban, I think, is clearly an extremist movement. The question, I think, more is how problematic are they and in terms of our national security priorities and that's a big problem for the United States right now, I think, and for the coalition. The question, you know, at this point, so if you, the Taliban's pretty extreme. One thing that, you know, maybe we've made some inroads and their belief structure is is that they're not so strongly affiliated with al-Qaeda anymore, which means they're not so strongly affiliated on the global level. So the question is, can we negotiate with them and get a settlement to get out of Afghanistan? And I think that it's probably worth trying to do that, but I don't think that necessarily, I think that would fall into the realm of imperfect things that maybe we have to live with rather than things that we enthusiastically embrace. I mean, there is research that if you do exclude these groups from settlements like that, then I mean, you're more likely to see relapse of violence. So we often don't want to negotiate with them, but actually negotiating with them to the extent that you can fully bring them in, right? Can actually lead to a more durable settlement. And having some more diversity when it comes to the people at the table. I think sometimes that gets forgotten, you know, who are the other stakeholders involved? And it's not necessarily, you know, two parties, but who are the other civil society members to bring it to a more successful status if it gets to the point where they can have some sort of peace negotiation. I saw a couple other hands, I'm sorry. If you had like the Taliban, I mean, you know, you see a Taliban movement starting up, then I think it's like probably a good idea to try and stop that from progressing. But if you have a Taliban movement that not only has been around for 20 years, but has also been successfully holding us off for 20 years, then maybe you have to make some difficult, painful concessions to reality. Yes. Hi, I'm Abdulashif of Georgetown University. Speaking about the structure of extremist groups, does they have a plan B if the group will collapse, then we'll create another group which with a new icon, a new picture, then the common people will follow that group with the same ideology or? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, these groups are not very static. We think, you know, I think that in post 9-11 we, all of us, I will include myself in that up to a point, sort of had this idea that Al Qaeda was never gonna change, right? And it was like, you know, you couldn't try and do anything to change what they believe, if they're fanatics who are never gonna change. And obviously that's not true. So we've seen, you know, slightly less extreme versions pop up in certain theaters. And obviously we've seen the dramatically more extreme version splintering off. You know, there's some good work on sort of the evolution of groups and movements and splinters. There's a, on the white nationalist front, Mark Pitt-Cavage at the ADL wrote a really good piece about how new white nationalist groups form and how these evolutions take place. Brock Mendelssohn had a book on the Al Qaeda franchise, which is not actually set out to discuss that question specifically, but in the course of talking about the franchise and how it has evolved, it really gets into a lot of those issues. And he has another book coming out called the failure of transnational jihadism that I think is probably gonna be very on point for this question. I mean, there's a constantly adapting, innovating, and I feel like we're always playing catch up, so. I know. And I think we have time for one more question. Yes. Hi, my name is Conrad Stowe, and I'm a student at Georgetown University. Does force conversion fit into your framework? And how about different types of force conversion, whether it's religious conversion or cultural conversion, or in the case of maybe abolitionism, political conversion, where some aspect of the outgroup's identity has to be changed, but not necessarily their humanity, their existence destroyed. Yeah, so I mean, I think that you can, I think there's always going to be conflicts about practices, right? So practices are a fair game. You can criticize practices. In a lot of different ways, and you know, I mean, we get into this a lot because of religious extremists in particular. It's like we start debating the merits of the religion, and then we start debating different pieces of it. I think you can target practices that are problematic and antisocial and dangerous to people without necessarily targeting the identity of the people who take part in those practices. Force conversion is, yes, it's absolutely, it's a hostile action. If you force somebody to abandon their identity group and adopt yours, that's a problem. And if you're obviously doing it by forces with violence, I think that I don't know how prevalent that is. Like I think that there's sort of, I guess there's an implied force conversion where if you're living in Raqqa and you're a Christian, you might convert. It's like ISIS isn't necessarily going to let go and then demand you convert or love you, they might. They beat you if they didn't, right? Yeah, well, do they or do they just kill them? For some of them, yeah. So yeah, I mean, that's clearly a hostile action. I've been trying to struggle a little bit about thinking about, when I was talking earlier about the tractability of the group definitions because there's something interesting to say about it and I haven't figured out quite what yet. But just that you have racial groups that have this very interactable in-group definition, you can never move between groups and you have religious groups where there's almost always a mechanism to join the in-group and then you have nationalist groups where how you join the in-group is the central theme. And I think there's something interesting to say about it but I don't know what because each tractability doesn't seem to relate to how extreme or problematic a group is. So ISIS is more tractable than the alt-right but it's more problematic for now. So. That's the thing in the Cold War, like democracy versus communism. I don't know if that would fit your mold but you have groups where people can move and. Well, you know, and it's interesting because a lot of extremist movements, domestic extremist movies, came out of the John Birch Society, right? Anti-Fervent, anti-communism that then turned into something that was more identifiably extremist. Or maybe even just a good state behavior. I mean, there's a lot of hostile actions being taken. I mean, you could almost sort of institutionalize extremism. Well, thank you so much. We've come to the end of our session but we really appreciate it. And JM, thank you so much, and Mary Beth and JM's book is for sale. So if you're interested in buying it, you know, Mary Beth and I both highly encourage it. It's tremendous and it's a great read and a quick read. So thank you all for coming and it was a pleasure having you.