11 May 2007
From Profiles to Pathways: The Road to Recruitment
Involvement in terrorism is a complex process of assimilation
By John Horgan
John Horgan, Ph.D., is senior research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, and lecturer in international relations at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. An Irish political psychologist, his Dr. Horgan’s most recent research is focused on movement into and out of terrorist groups. His book, Walking Away from Terrorism: Accounts of Disengagement from Radical and Extremist Movements, will be published in 2008.
Less than a year after four coordinated suicide bombings targeted London’s underground rail system on July 7, 2005, an eagerly awaited House of Commons Report(1) into the events of that day concluded: “What we know of previous extremists in the UK shows that there is not a consistent profile to help identify who may be vulnerable to radicalization. Of the four individuals here, three were second-generation British citizens whose parents were of Pakistani origin and one whose parents were of Jamaican origin; Kamel Bourgass, convicted of the Ricin plot, was an Algeria failed asylum seeker; Richard Reid, the failed shoe bomber, had an English mother and Jamaican father. … Some have been well-educated, some less so. Some genuinely poor, some less so. Some apparently well integrated in the UK, others not. Most single, but some family men with children. Some previously law-abiding, others with a history of petty crime.”
Implicit throughout this remarkable report was a sense of frustration at the failure to arrive at a clear profile of those who have been recruited into al-Qaida’s global campaign of terrorism and subversion. That same frustration is, in fact, apparent in many policy and law enforcement circles, and despite the failure by researchers to arrive at any valid and reliable terrorist profile, the search for one continues.
Profiling the Terrorist
However, notwithstanding the evidence that, logically, terrorist profiles are unlikely to emerge at all,(2) that this search continues unabated is hardly surprising. There are some clear and understandable issues that drive the attempts to profile.
On the one hand, the dramatic consequences of successful terrorist activity force us to confront the effects of behavior that would, to most normal people, suggest abnormality or some sort of sickness—”how could anyone do this?” being a typical response to the shocking behavior associated with terrorist attacks.
A second issue that drives profiling efforts is another basic question: Given that so many people are exposed to the presumed generating conditions for terrorism (or “root causes”), the triggering factors and catalysts—both for religious and political mobilization—that may lead to engagement in violent activity, why is it that so few people actually become recruited?
This is a difficult question to answer, and any answer we do provide will certainly not be satisfactory to all. A temptation, which has heavily influenced the nature and direction of some prior research (especially from psychologists), has been to assume that some qualities of specialness exist both within a specific group of terrorists—in terms of what makes them “alike”—as well as what presumably makes them “different” from the rest of us (or at least to those who do not engage in terrorism).
Psychologist and terrorism expert Ariel Merari has correctly argued that it is more precise to state that “no terrorist profile has been found” rather than that “there is no terrorist profile.”(3) However, I would strongly argue that there are several real dangers associated with the continued effort to construct such profiles, particularly as far as understanding recruitment to terrorism is concerned.
In assuming the existence of a profile, we tend to miss several critical features associated with the development of the terrorist. These include, but are not limited to:
• The gradual nature of the relevant socialization processes into terrorism
• A sense of the supportive qualities associated with that recruitment (e.g., the “pull” factors, or lures, that attract people to either involvement in terrorism in a broad sense, or those positive lures that are used to groom potential recruits)
• The sense of migration between roles (e.g., moving from fringe activity such as public protest to illegal, focused behavior—in other words, moving from one role to another)
• A sense of the importance of role qualities (e.g., what attractions does being a sniper hold as opposed to becoming a suicide bomber, and how do these “role qualities” become apparent to the onlooker or potential recruit?)
When we assume static qualities of the terrorist (a feature of profiles), we become blind to the factors and dynamics that shape and support the development of the terrorist. One further consequence is that we also obscure the basis from which a more practical counterterrorism strategy might develop to prevent or control the extent of those who initially become involved in terrorism.
Those who work in counterterrorism, however, frequently rely on profiles. Having recently delivered a presentation on terrorist profiling before an audience of counterterrorism officials, a senior official protested to me, “Profiles are useful. Of course they are. The reason … is that your average suicide bomber is not going to be the middle-aged, white, father of three kids.” This comment was made in the United Kingdom, where, obviously, this response can be understood by virtue of the fact that we have not seen a suicide bomber of this kind there yet.
The point here is not to feed into an anything-is-possible exaggeration and distortion of the threat, but to be mindful that the assumptions that feed into how we think about the terrorist are based increasingly on the actuarial projections from a small, and statistically insignificant, sample of individuals. The dangers of overgeneralization should be obvious.
But highlighting these limitations still does not answer the critical question: Why does one person become involved in terrorism and the other not? Without a doubt, it is practically impossible to answer this question satisfactorily, but we do have some helpful starting points. In a recent book,(4) I have identified a series of what I have termed predisposing risk factors for involvement in terrorism. In no particular order, these include:
• Personal experiences of victimization (which can be real or imagined)
• Expectations about involvement (e.g., the lures—such as excitement, mission, sense of purpose—associated with being involved in any “insider” group and its various roles)
• Identification with a cause, frequently associated with some victimized community
• Socialization through friends or family, or being raised in a particular environment
• Opportunity for expression of interest and steps toward involvement
• Access to the relevant group
It must be stated that, individually, none of these will ever help explain why people become terrorists, but, taken in combination, they do provide a powerful framework for understanding why one person might become involved in terrorism and another does not.
Terrorist Pathways
In order to move beyond rather sterile and unhelpful debates about profiling, it might be useful to consider what involvement in terrorism implies so that we begin to move toward what I would argue are more fruitful avenues for psychologically informed counterterrorism initiatives.
Foremost among these is that the reality of involvement in terrorism today is typified by its complexity: Involvement in terrorism seems to imply—and result in—very different things to very different people.(5) This also seems to be the case within the same group, as well as across the spectrum of terrorist movements. Far from the simplistic distinctions between leaders and followers, even the smallest of terrorist movements comprise a variety of roles and functions into which recruits are assigned or encouraged to move toward, depending on a plethora of factors. Additionally, adoption and retention of those roles is neither discrete nor static. There is very often migration both between and within roles, from illegal (e.g., engaging in violent activity) to grey areas (supporting the engagement in violent activity) to legal (e.g., peaceful protest).
While many of the activities that terrorist movements engage in are not actually illegal per se (and cannot be meaningfully encompassed under the label “terrorism,” but perhaps instead “subversion”), without them actual terrorist operations could not exist.
For the most part, engagement in violent activity is that which we most commonly associate with terrorism. However, the reality of terrorist movements today is that this most public of roles and functions tends to merely represent the tip of an iceberg of activity. Supporting the execution of a violent attack are those directly aiding and abetting the event, those who house the terrorist or provide other kinds of support, those who raise funds, generate publicity, provide intelligence, and so forth.
The person we think of as “the terrorist” is therefore fulfilling only one, albeit the most dramatic in terms of direct consequences, of multiple functions in the movement.
One consequence of the complexity of these issues is the obvious need for the development of more imaginative and flexible counterterrorism initiatives. If we were to stretch the continuum of functions associated with terrorist movements outward even more, we would see that the farther away we move from the violence associated with terrorism, the more we move toward identifying functions that become increasingly difficult to classify either as terrorism or even illegal. Put another way, there is much more to terrorist movements than “terrorism.”
Avenues for Counterterrorism
How people move between and within roles (i.e, migration and promotion, respectively) is poorly understood. Overall, we can say that involvement in terrorism is a complex process, comprising discrete phases that could be encapsulated as an individual terrorist engages in a gradual process of accommodation and assimilation across incrementally experienced stages.
There is a sense of ongoing movement into, through, and, sometimes, out of different roles and functions. Despite the fact that timing will always depend on a host of factors, and some individuals appear to become involved more quickly than others, a constant quality across all terrorist movements is this gradual sense of progression. The notion of there being a moment of epiphany that explains some assumedly conscious decision to become a terrorist is naïve, misleading, and, crucially, unsupported by empirical evidence.
Furthermore, this process of movement is based on initially supportive qualities: While terrorism will always be a product of its own time and place, and multiple motivations will co-exist for members of even the same movement, the most obvious common denominator influencing individuals’ embracement of their own radicalization—at any level—is a sense of positive expectation.
We do not engage in behavior unless we view it as having some distinct benefit to us. The same applies to the behavior of the terrorist. Sometimes that might be expressed in terms of expectations about achieving a sense of status, authority, acceptance, mission, and so forth. And as long as commitment and dedication to one’s socialization further and further into the movement remains positive for the follower, this eventually results in the formation of a new—or at least effectively consolidated—identity.
If we want to appreciate what, if anything, is the “terrorist mind,” it is probably best thought of as the product of:
• Increased socialization into a terrorist movement and its associated engagement in illegal activity
• Focused behavior, more generally, that is increasingly relevant to the context of a terrorist movement
From a personal and social perspective, this often means that a socialization into terrorism, and those associated with it, sees a socialization away from nonrelevant friends, family, and the person’s former life.
One of several consequences that would seem to emerge from making distinctions between these phases is that we might begin to develop phase-specific counterterrorism initiatives, depending on what it is we can ascertain is the most effective intervention point; that is, whether it be initial prevention of involvement, subsequent disruption of engagement, or eventual facilitation of disengagement. Acknowledging these distinctions will lead us into realizing that there are probably unique kinds of interventions to be developed, depending on where we eventually decide our interventions are best focused.
Despite the fact that the disengagement phase remains the most poorly understood and least researched, ironically, it is in this phase that I would argue that practical counterterrorism initiatives—aimed not only at facilitation of disengagement but at prevention of initial involvement—might actually become more effective.
The Importance of the Individual
While terrorism ultimately is a group activity, that group will always comprise individuals each of whom has a role to play, as outlined above. Although counterterrorism programs generally do not tend to focus on individuals, it is precisely by understanding individual radicalization and its associated social and psychological qualities that we can get a sense of what kinds of dynamics need to be understood in order to develop ways of promoting disengagement.(6)
Although terrorism can bring about significant and large-scale consequences, it remains, in essence, low-level, low-volume, and disproportionate activity perpetrated by individuals. The large-scale significance and impact of terrorism should never deter us from engaging in microanalyses both of the terrorist and of terrorist events.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
Endnotes
(1) House of Commons Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005 (London: The Stationery Office, 2006), p. 31.
(2) For a detailed explanation, see John Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2005).
(3) Personal correspondence.
(4) John Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2005).
(5) This issue and its implications are discussed in detail in M. Taylor and J. Horgan, “A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Development of Psychological Process in the Terrorist,” Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 18 (2006): pp. 1-17.
(6) Work on this issue has begun at the University of St. Andrews and will be published in 2008. See John Horgan, Walking Away From Terrorism: Accounts of Disengagement From Radical and Extremist Movements (New York: Routledge, in press).
