That has long been a favored explanation for eruptions of terrorism. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, a succession of global leaders—among them Tony Blair, Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Oscar Arias Sanchez, and Elie Weisel—fastened on poverty, illiteracy, and an absence of education as “root causes” of the violent phenomenon.

“We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror …” President George W. Bush declared before the United Nations Financing for Development Conference in March 2002. “We will challenge the poverty and hopelessness and lack of education and failed governments that too often allow conditions that terrorists can seize and try to turn to their advantage.”

These arguments remain canons of the conventional wisdom on terrorism a decade and a half later—even though historical and contemporary empirical evidence don’t support such claims.

To the contrary, those historically attracted to terrorism have in fact tended to be well educated, financially comfortable, and often gainfully employed.

Osama bin Laden obtained degrees in economics and public administration from Saudi Arabia’s King Abdul-Aziz University while ISIS’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has both a Masters and a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the University of Islamic Sciences at Adhamiya, a Baghdad suburb.

A century ago, Irish Republican Army volunteers in West Cork were “more likely to have jobs, trades, and an education than was typical of their peers,” according to Peter Hart. Similarly, Menachem Begin, a prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who’d earlier in life led a Jewish terrorist group in British Mandate Palestine, received his law degree from Warsaw University in 1935. Yasir Arafat, Begin’s Palestinian counterpart who was awarded his own Nobel Peace Prize, graduated from Cairo’s Fouad the First University (now Cairo University) and was employed as an engineer in Kuwait before founding al-Fatah. George Habash, the founder and leader of the rival Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was the son of a wealthy grain merchant who received his medical degree from the American University in Beirut as did his close friend and collaborator, Wadi Haddad, the mastermind of the PFLP’s most spectacular aircraft hijackings—including the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe, Uganda.

In a study of madrassas (Islamic schools) and lack of education as a putative terrorist incubator, researchers at New America, a Washington think tank, also reached the conclusion that terrorism is not linked to an absence of schooling. Using a database of some 79 jihadis who were responsible for the five most serious terrorist incidents between 1993 and 2005, they found that 54 percent of the perpetrators either attended university or had obtained a university degree. These terrorists, they concluded, “thus appear, on average, to be as well educated as many Americans”—given that only about half of the persons living in the U.S. have attended university. The researchers further noted that two-thirds of the 25 terrorists involved in the planning and hijacking of the four aircraft on September 11, 2001 had attended university. Finally, they observed that the most popular subject amongst those who attended university was engineering, followed by medicine.

That engineers have disproportionately filled the ranks of violent Islamist movements is the central argument of Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog’s recent book, Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education. They found that 69 percent of their sample of 335 violent jihadis had attended institutes of higher education—nearly half of whom had studied engineering. Gambetta and Hertog argue:

“Relative to their presence in the male population in their countries of origin, the number of engineers among [Islamist] extremist groups is 14 times what we would expect … Furthermore, the over-representation is evenly distributed across all groups and across all countries of origin …”

Among the more notorious terrorists with academic degrees in this particular field were Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center, who studied electrical engineering at a technical institute in Wales; his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the architect of the September 11 attacks, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from a North Carolina state university; and, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber,” a Nigerian national and son of a wealthy banker who tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. His mechanical engineering degree was awarded by University College London—one of Britain’s top universities.

The popularity of medicine as a terrorist vocation is, of course, also not new. In addition to the aforementioned doctors Habash and Haddad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s current leader, is a trained surgeon. Some of the best known terrorists in recent years with medical degrees were among the eight persons arrested in Britain following the botched attempt to bomb a nightclub in central London and the dramatic, but largely ineffectual, attack on Glasgow’s International Airport in June 2007. Six of the eight perpetrators were either doctors or medical students; and of the remaining two, one was employed as a technician in a hospital laboratory.

Perhaps the seminal scholarly work to debunk the conventional wisdom that links poverty and lack of education to terrorism is the 2003 article by Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger and his Australian colleague, Jitka Malecková. Surveying American white supremacists, members of the Israeli Jewish (right wing) underground, Hezbollah fighters, and Palestinian suicide bombers, they concluded that not only is there little evidence for this causality but in fact persons with higher incomes and more education are more likely to join terrorist groups. In the case of the Israeli Jewish underground, they found that “these Israeli extremists were disproportionately well-educated and in high-paying occupations. The list includes teachers, writers, university students, geographers, engineers, entrepreneurs, a combat pilot, a chemist, and a computer programmer.” For Hezbollah, they determined that fewer of its members came from impoverished or uneducated backgrounds compared to the general Lebanese population (28 percent versus 33 percent). Krueger and Malecková determined that Palestinian suicide bombers were also “less likely to come from impoverished families and are much more likely to have completed high school and attended college than the general Palestinian population.”

This counterintuitive conclusion about Palestinian suicide bombers—given the immense poverty and deprivation that continues to define the Palestinian people’s existence—is well supported by evidence gathered by Nasra Hassan, a United Nations aid worker based in Gaza, who has extensively studied the tendency of Palestinian youth to embrace terrorist martyrdom. Writing in The New Yorker shortly after the September 11 attacks, she observed that none of the nearly 250 suicide bombers and would-be suicide bombers she interviewed between 1996 and 1999 were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held jobs. Two were the sons of millionaires.

Similarly, according to Ronni Shaked, an Israeli journalist and former Shabak (Israel Security Agency or Shin-Bet) intelligence officer and expert on Hamas, “All leaders of Hamas are university graduates, some with M.A. degrees. … It is not a movement of poor, miserable people, but the highly educated who are using poverty to make the periphery of the movement more powerful.”

Having said all this, it would be wrong to conclude terrorist organizations are populated exclusively by the financially comfortable and educated. Indeed, an inevitable bifurcation generally occurs across all terrorist movements whereby the top leadership and mid-level command strata are populated by the educated (or relatively well-educated) and financially well off, while the majority of foot soldiers are less educated and often from far more modest socioeconomic backgrounds.

The reasons why someone picks up a gun or throws a bomb represent an ineluctably personal choice born variously of grievance and frustration; religious piety or the desire for systemic socio-economic change; irredentist conviction or commitment to some utopian or millenarian ideal. The forces that impel individuals to become terrorists are thus timeless.

The post Sorry, Politicians, But Fighting Poverty Isn’t Going to Defeat Terrorism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There are three different approaches a country can take against violent extremism and terrorism: prevention, repression, and intervention. Mostly, Western countries rely on prevention and repression. They focus on containing the active extremist movement through law enforcement operations or they finance large-scale educational and advocacy programs directed at those deemed to be at risk of violent radicalization. However, Western governments often overlook more targeted deradicalization programs (sometimes called “off-ramps”) that engage the families and the immediate communities of individuals deemed to be falling under the sway of extremist narratives.

Two years ago I founded GIRDS, the German Institute for Radicalization and Deradicalization Studies, which works worldwide to figure out how to intervene when people become radicalized. I first became interested in the topic growing up in a small suburb of Berlin where neo-Nazi skinheads were an accepted part of the youth culture. I went away to university and then on a Fulbright to study violent extremism and counterterrorism. Since then, I have been working as a family counsellor to develop deradicalization programs, including specially designed family counselling programs for relatives of Jihadi fighters.

As governments increase the pressure on extremist groups through sting operations and raids, some members begin to crack, facing a choice to either withdraw from the group (which they might want to do, if given a path to do so) or escalate their commitment by doing something violent. Intervention programs aim to provide that first path, allowing wavering members of an extremist cell a way out. A key ingredient of such programs is the debunking of appealing extremist narratives. We strive to destroy the “jihadi cool” by having someone say, “I’ve been there … And it sucks.” In the end prevention and repression are much more effective when complemented by such targeted intervention programs.

If we want to prevent future attacks, we need to recruit family and close friends of potential attackers into the counterterrorism effort and provide them with specially trained experts. In almost all previous attacks by lone actors or members of small terror cells, someone in the attackers’ close social environment recognized a disturbing change in their behavior. Sometimes, this close relative or friend even knew about the attack plans.

Frequently these families or friends are desperate to get help and advice on what to do, despite their mixed feelings about betraying a loved one, but law enforcement rarely offers a strategy for making this seem possible.

In every country that has introduced a dedicated family counselling hotline and support program against violent radicalization to date, these programs were almost instantly overwhelmed with calls and requests for help from families of individuals from all different stages of radicalization. This indicates the high demand and the success in reaching out to the affected families once they are offered specially designed programs and neutral third party counsellors.

Designed and conducted correctly, these programs empower families and communities to counter the appeal of violent extremism. We work by reaching out to the gatekeepers—family and close friends. Because these gatekeepers know their friends and relatives best, they also know what might have motivated them to join the radical group and what drives them. These gatekeepers also have the legitimacy to suggest alternatives and bring in other solutions. But for that, they need help and strong support networks.

Mothers are essential gatekeepers. Most of the mothers I have worked with who have lost their children to ISIS or other terrorist groups have noticed something changing about their children, but were mostly alone without any outside help. When these families contact me from around the world, what I hear almost every time is the urge to understand what is happening and how to do something about it. Many parents act on their own, take away passports, lock their children up, or move with them into another town. These reactions are understandable but are counterproductive and can further push the radicalization process.

There is a common saying amongst Jihadis: “Allah tests the ones he loves,” meaning that any obstacle on the path to martyrdom will be seen as proof that one is the chosen one. In addition, recruiters and the Salafi-Jihadi ideology explain to those drawn to terrorism that these signs of rejection by their own family are a natural consequence of the perfect truth they have found. The biological family is superseded by the spiritual one—the ummah— and in this way even your own mother can be labelled as “infidel” and part of the enemy.

When a mother comes to us, she is assigned a trained case manager. Together they will analyze the child’s situation and try to identify the “radicalization recipe.” What is driving the son or daughter towards ISIL? Together they will design a step-by-step plan, identify external partners, and build support networks around the family. The counselor will teach the family de-escalation techniques to reduce frustration, fights in the family, and bullying in school. They will bring in positive alternatives addressing the motives of the son/daughter. Does he or she want to help women and children in Syria? The mother might suggest that the youth work with a Muslim charity, or do a fundraising campaign with a legitimate organization. Also, the mother will get constant risk analysis from the counselor so that they will be able to decide if and when to bring the matter to law enforcement. The counselor is a bridge between the family and all relevant external partners.

To connect mothers to one another, we’ve built a community called Mothers for Life, which exists mainly online but also has met a couple of times in person. When we wrote an open letter to ISIL in the summer 2015 and the group responded the same day on Twitter, we knew that they were afraid of the parents’ power to block their recruitment efforts. This letter contained the feelings and questions mothers around the world had when their beloved ones were taken away against their will—in stark contrast to the fundamental values of Islam. We wanted to pose questions designed to dissolve parts of the ISIS narrative. After receiving letters from imprisoned fighters saying they have realized what they did to their own mothers and that they want to leave jihadism behind, we knew it worked.

Mobilizing mothers fixes another hole in the law-enforcement strategy. Parents in the Mothers for Life network have told me that they do not have a problem in principle with cooperating with law enforcement agencies, but that they have lost trust in them. Sometimes intelligence and police placed surveillance on their children and did nothing to stop them from leaving. Sometimes the mothers were treated as terrorists themselves during house searches. At other times they have even been charged by courts with providing material support to terrorist organizations, despite doing everything they could to get their children back. Sometimes I have to explain to the authorities what the role of the families is, that they are allies and want to help, that they should be respected and seen as partners, not suspects.

Mothers for Life is currently active in 11 countries (U.S.A., Canada, France, U.K., Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Norway). Most of the parents involved have their own national organizations to support other families. GIRDS experts are based in six countries (Germany, France, England, U.S.A., Canada, and Denmark) and have trained experts and advised governments around the globe on how to counter violent extremism. Most recently I was asked to train probation officers in Minneapolis on deradicalization interventions and to conduct risk and radicalization evaluation studies for a number of defendants.

ISIS itself has announced that taking away its territory in Syria and Iraq will not defeat its brand and core ideas. It will continue to recruit and shift its tactics and strategy to overseas terror attacks. That makes it all the more important for Western societies to counter ISIS’s appeal and that of other violent extremist and terrorist organizations, and there can be no more effective fighters in that cause than the families and immediate communities of those disaffected youths tempted by the perverted promise of martyrdom.

The post The Most Overlooked Resource in Fighting Violent Extremism? Moms. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.