Paper presented to the panel, Terrorism Threat Assessment Radicalisation/Deradicalisation Pathways, at the Regional Conference on Enhancing Resilience Against Violent Extremism Among Migrant Workers in Southeast Asia, convened by the United Nations Office of Counterterrorism, National Counter Terrorism Agency (Indonesia), and Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Jakarta, Indonesia, 4–5 October.
Many thanks indeed to the conference organisers for the kind invitation and the opportunity to be with you here today to share my thoughts and to learn from you in relation to some important and urgent challenges that face us all.
I would like to use this opportunity to offer my thoughts in relation to the question of extremism and radicalisation with a focus on the global north, in particular Europe, and some of the lessons that we have learned around how we understand the problem and what we might do about it, and then to see if some of these issues and themes chime with what’s going on in this part of the world and, in particular, in relation to the question of the radicalisation of migrant workers in this region.
Much has been said about the radicalisation process in the last two decades or so, specifically since the events of 9/11, when the entire world was charged with serious and urgent questions in relation to domestic extremism in the west and extremism and terrorism emerging in sites of conflict in the non-western world. Fast forward to today, and here we are talking about radicalisation again, and in this case, in relation to the specific instances concerning migrant workers in the region. However, before we can fully begin to understand what might be going on and what we could do to try and help the situation, it is important to run through some key points and understandings around what we tend to think and act upon and what tends to be the case more often than not with respect to observable outcomes with respect to understanding radicalisation and how to counter it.
Undoubtedly, the crucial point to start with is that radicalisation is not necessarily a given. That is, it is very much a construction in the same way that terrorism is. The origins of dealing with terrorism relate closely to the workings of states relating to questions of defence and security more generally. Hence, there has always been a need to try and deal with urgent and wicked problems with quite direct solutions, many of which can and often do lead to violations of human rights, human freedoms, and human dignities. These are the inevitable consequences of rushing to find solutions due to the enormous impact terrorism can have on perceptions of fear, trust in government, trust in institutions, inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic relations, and wider and more economically impactful issues such as tourism, and this is in both the western and eastern worlds. These are some of the wider historical, cultural, and sociological backgrounds that are clear and straightforward to appreciate, but it is important to understand the starting points so that we can have a clear bearing on where we might be today.
My work has concentrated on Europe and the experience of Muslim minorities on questions relating to radicalisation and deradicalisation. In this respect, I can provide insights on matters that tend to be misunderstood and things that tend to lead to more problems than solutions. Without a doubt, there tends to be a dogged insistence on regarding radicalisation as a function of individual-level problems that are materialised at some macro or global level. That is, individual grievances, anxieties, as well as traumas can lead to vulnerabilities and susceptibilities, which then can be exploited by external forces through ideological conviction and mobilisation. In the recent past, much of this was said to be based on real-world interaction, but in today’s world there is an implicit assumption that it is organised digitally and online through various social media platforms, including online gaming. The evidence tends to be patchy, and we tend to extrapolate based on a few cases that show these patterns in order to suggest a wider set of outcomes. The reality is that this individual-level focus tends to overemphasise the importance of ideology and psychology but often misses the sociology of the political context in which these grievances are mobilised. That is, there is never any real attempt to look at the nature of these grievances in the context of radicalisation to be able to provide a wider set of workable solutions that are structural, institutional, and cultural rather than responses to individual-level issues that are isolated and separate from the wider workings of society. The reality is that extremism or radicalisation can never exist in a vacuum. There needs to be a framework in which they are operationalised, and these are often based on external meso and macro concerns in relation to being and becoming.
In my current work on northwestern Europe, I focus on identity, belonging, and citizenship, and the relations with the state, which has a history of exclusion, marginalisation, and alienation in relation to the Muslim minority experience. Much of this goes back to the post-war migration periods that define the current demographic landscape of European Muslims. Groups were effectively invited to conduct work in the least desirable industrial sectors of the economy. When those economic bases shifted as a result of globalisation and deindustrialisation, many of these minorities remained trapped in the same towns and cities, leaving them exposed and vulnerable to the downwards social forces of economic inequality and widening social divisions at the hands of a neoliberal market-oriented state and its focus on championing the role of individuals in a competitive framework to elicit economic growth. We know now that this neoliberal economic trickle-down model does not work despite all the attempts made by states to possess this line of policymaking. The work I am doing at the moment in Northwest Europe for the European Commission-funded Drive project looks at the role of social exclusion in radicalisation in the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. It focuses on issues of loss of identity, the formation of issues of resistance and its mobilisation within the geographical context of peripheral elements of post-industrial societies, the nature of intergenerational change that comes about as a result of a generational change to the economy and society that leads to further dislocation and alienation, and the significance of reciprocal radicalisation where there are issues of groups formalising and activating grievances in the context of the othering of the other. In this case, I am talking about the far right and Islamist groups who shape their discourse based on local, national, and global manifestations. The spate of recent Quran burnings in Norway and Denmark suggests that there are individuals who are prepared to agitate in order to present a case in relation to freedom of speech and the response by angry, agitated young Muslims is projected as the problem when the Quran burnings are protected by the police, but angry Muslims are presented by the media and politics as undesirable and risky.
There is a need to counter these issues that remain important to delimit intolerance and the risks of polarisation leading to violent extremism. However, it is only in recent times that states have begun to take into consideration the role of individual psychological and structural issues in combination, and this is largely because of the rise of the far right and instances of plots and cases of extremism that have infiltrated institutions and communities across Europe and also North America. In the case of Islamists in the past, the solution often presented was to work through the pathways and reverse them. These pathways were seen at the level of individual risk, networks, and associations, online and in the real world, and the mobilisation of extremism through ideological activation. Efforts were made to introduce strategic communication online and to collaborate with imams and mosques in order to empower and build capacity to build resilience from within, including empowering women and providing greater emphasis on gender equality. These were the solutions offered at the level of wider society. Within institutions such as prisons, Imams were provided opportunities to introduce educational instruction that has helped to disarm Islamists through a process of ideological reorientation. That is, introducing alternative systems of knowledge to counter the black and white thinking (low integrative complexity) that can characterise those who see the world in such oppositional terms, using the language of religion as a way in which to justify and mobilise their violent extremist factions. These have produced solutions to a considerable extent over the last few decades in that there is greater resilience to these kinds of issues within Muslim communities in terms of being able to introduce alternative Islamic systems of knowledge and practice. In many cases, in relation to, for example, British Pakistanis, there is greater mobilisation around appreciating specific discourses that open up thinking on being British and being a Muslim rather than seeing it as a restricted space. This has always been about capacity, and there has always been a need for professionalisation, and this has been seen largely as a result of internal resource mobilisation in the context of heavy state discourses. The situation with respect to British and other European Muslims is that the fewer numbers have been much as a result of a natural evolution from within, but also in the post-pandemic world, individuals and communities are charged with quite different urgent needs and wants.
Over the last few years, with the emergence of the Islamic State and instances of plots and terrorist acts in the global north, national and international institutions were charged with countering violent extremism and finding solutions to these cases of unprecedented levels of terrorism and with dealing with returnees from the Islamic State in relation to the re-integration of children and other issues around citizenship, and much of this remains ongoing. But the far-right threat has grown in Europe, and this is not anecdotal. There are numerous cases of young men who have reverted to neo-Nazi ideology in the armies of Canada, the UK, and Germany. There are known and unknown plots that have been thwarted by the security, intelligence, and police services. Without a doubt, the far-right terrorist threat remains the greatest concern for internal security concerns across Europe and the global north. The events of January 6th, 2021, on Capitol Hill serve as a reminder that many factions can coalesce around anti-state, anti-immigrant, anti-minorities, specifically South American and Muslim minorities, conspiracy theories, and hardcore neo-Nazi groups in an effort to destabilise the state at its core. What to do about these issues is less clear. However, there seems to be a focus on precisely the kinds of issues that are important when thinking about Islamist groups. Specifically, the institutions, community settings, and the issues of education and empowerment among disaffected groups are all the same, but the scale of this is tremendous. Due to the wider ongoing problems of neoliberal localisation and globalisation, they are, however, unlikely to be treated fully due to the significant resource demands needed.
And so, in many ways, we have come full circle. We cannot deal with the wider structural issues because they are so deep and there is often not enough time because of the urgency of trying to find solutions that must be implemented sooner rather than later. Individual-level solutions that are multifaceted can only be the tangible way forward for questions of deradicalisation and delegitimisation with scaled and measurable interventions that are operationalized at various local levels with joined-up thinking across regions and across supra-governmental institutions. The problems, however, will not go away on their own through these specific interventions. The problems will remain because the challenges are much greater. In the end, the radicalisation initiatives that are put into practise need to remain sensitive to the ongoing nature of these challenges and why they are not static. The technological tools available to those working in these realms of countering extremism mean that issues of digital surveillance lead to the accusation of greater securitisation, but this remains a price worth considering paying by states who place the importance of national security ahead of individual-level freedoms and liberties. These concerns remain important as part of ongoing discussions on the nature of individual-state relations, but they will also be susceptible to the whims of wider macroeconomic issues. Hence, in dealing with radicalisation in the post-pandemic world, there are growing challenges in relation to issues of conspiracy theories, online gaming and how it is used as a form of recruiting, particularly far-right individuals and actors, but also the populist, authoritarian, majoritarian nationalism politics that seems to be taking hold across the world. In these instances, individual rights and freedoms face increasing challenges while states continue to maintain their grip on their populations in order to keep everyone safe.
But the reality is that, in many cases, when communities are empowered and self-aware, there is an openness internally to new ways of understanding and being. I am specifically focusing on Muslim minorities in the west here, where there are opportunities for resistance and resilience from within. How this can be applied to the global south is much more complicated due to the demographic challenges associated with this part of the world, which combine issues of equality of opportunity, economic activity, and governance. But despite these issues, and aside from conflict-ridden zones in parts of South Asia as well as sub-Saharan Africa in particular, in Southeast Asia and specifically across the ASEAN region, the cases of radicalisation leading to terrorism remain limited. One question that needs to be asked is whether states consider the need to limit how people move towards extremist ideas per se, which is something that the West has attempted to introduce. But this creates more challenges because it takes away agency from people who may well have real issues of resistance. Some grievances are often genuine issues relating to freedom and liberty that individuals feel are important and necessary. It is all part of the greater good and not due to individual-level trauma. And here, the solutions lie less in individual interventions but in wider societal development, where concerns around integration, cohesion, stability, and mobility remain paramount.
I hope you find some of these thoughts useful and relevant. I thank you for your time and attention. I look forward to your questions and comments.