Terrorism Perspectives from the Behavioral and Social Sciences (2002) / Chapter Skim
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2. Origins and Contexts of Terrorism
2. Origins and Contexts of Terrorism
Pages 18-36
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From page 18... ...
the historical, social, political, and cultural conditions that constitute a favorable soil in which terrorism can take root and grow, provide a continuously changing mix of support and discouragement for terrorism, and constitute one of the main audiences for terror
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From page 19... ...
Military conquest, settlement, territorial acquisition, and administrative rule sometimes military, sometimes civil is the essence, but in practice the administrative rule varied from direct rule resembling imperialism to indirect rule involving a symbiotic relationship between colonial rulers and indigenous authorities. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism also involved more striking economic contrasts between the technological and industrial superiority of the (developed)
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From page 20... ...
,1 There is also an aspect of military domination, but this is primarily realized not through military conquest and administration of occupied territory, but through a technologically superior arsenal of weaponry, occasional wars and "peacekeeping" interventions, and, above all else, military intimidation. American hegemony also has a less tangible political-ideological ingredient, namely, a conviction of the moral superiority of a particular (American)
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Of special subsequent significance was the century-Iong (~830 through the end of World War I) colonization and political control of North Africa and the Near East countries of Syria, Lebanon, and modern :traq, fordan, and the Palestine mandate.
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It is hard for such countries to guarantee employment for their youth, who experience high rates of unemployment, engage in criminal activity or gang violence, or must otherwise migrate to the richer countries, where they work in low-level jobs. Such poor countries are also often obliged to spend substantial sums on police control and national defense against neighboring poor countries, in which they employ local youth in low-level military jobs.
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These poor compare themselves with the rich in their own societies and with an unrealistic view of Western culture gleaned from films and television, and thus they also experience a high level of relative deprivation. This combination is a sure recipe for social unrest in general.
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At the millenarian moment, too, white Westerners would be destroyed, and the true believers would survive in a world of Western plenty (Worsley, 1957~. Further evidence of this type of ambivalence is provided by the fact that colonial societies, once independent, frequently establish institutions and retain political and other values resembling those of their former conquerors.
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From page 25... ...
and peyote religion (SIotkin, 1956) , revivaTist cults, nationalist movements in colonial societies, revivalist and fundamentalist Christian movements, and in some extreme Western political movements such as fascism.
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The historical picture in many Muslim societies is not different from this general pattern. The analogy is not between cults and terrorism as such, but between nativistic movements and Islamic revivalism, which provides a fertile ground for religiously based terrorism.
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From page 27... ...
Rather, the presence of extreme Tslamic fundamentalism, like the demographic, economic, and political realities fount! in most Muslim societies, is part of the fertile seedbed in which a particular ideologically based brand of terrorism fincis a supportive audience and some recruits.
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From page 28... ...
that these organizations are out of range of institutions of truce, international diplomacy, alliances, and treaties, all of which are peaceful alternatives to warlike violence; (b) that, unlike states, these organizations (lo not face the "conservatizing" influences imposed by the state's necessity to maintain law and order and manage politically negotiated relationships among diverse groups (except in the most totalitarian of societies, and to a limited degree in these)
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From page 29... ...
The standard Western model of a state is that it is a discrete, territorially bounded, politically sovereign unit with a legal monopoly over force and violence, responsible for law and order in its domestic population, and the focus of the solidarity, culture, and identity of its citizens. Regarding the panoply of states and other organizations in the contemporary world, we must conclude that the state is not a unitary thing that is either present or absent but is a continuum.
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From page 30... ...
('1~V~ DUAL MOT~VAT~ON'S With respect to motivational profiles, work by Jerrold Post and others has suggested some similarities among members of given terrorist organizations, as well as some differences among the prototypical membership of different organizations. For instance, members of the German Red Army Faction and the Italian Red Brigades were likely to come from broken homes, and members of the Basque ETA group have come disoronor 1 1 TERRORISM: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
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From page 31... ...
They are also found in cultures outside the province of the three major Near Eastern religions, although it is not always clear that they have appeared entirely independently of their influence (examples are Melanesian cargo cults and the ghost dance of American Indians)
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As Ehud Sprinzak notes: "Icleological terrorism does not emerge from a vacuum or from an inexplicable urge on the Dart - [ ~ {~`AT 1l~ct~hlm r~Hi~lc tm - m hPrc~rk ~^ ~ .... In the main, the process does not involve isolated individuals who become terrorists on their own because their psyche is split or they suffer from Tow esteem and need extravagant compensation.
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, Timothy McVeigh (the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber) , Osama bin Laden (likely planner of the September 11 carnage)
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As a result, there are only some, mainly indirect insights about terrorist organizations from the literature on formal organizations (Crenshaw, 1987~. The characteristics of terrorist organizations can be understood by tracing out the implications of the fact that terrorism must be simultaneously invisible and at the same time coordinated for preparing and executing terrorist activities.
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From page 35... ...
If they are unknown to those states—rarely if ever the case—then questions of foreign relations with them are moot, because terrorist organizations avoid routine interactions with governing regimes. However, host states usually know about, tolerate, protect, or promote terrorist organizations for their own political purposes.
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From page 36... ...
However, the world has experienced many other kinds of secret, network-based organizations, and a base of knowledge about them and their operations has accumulated (Kerbs, 2001~. Among these organizations are spy networks, gang rings such as the Mafia, drug-trafficking organizations, Communist cells, sabotage operations undertaken during wartime and during the cold war period, and extremist social and political movement organizations.
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