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The Rise and Fall of Violent Extremism

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It is taken-for-granted that the one-size-fits-all approach does not work for extremism prevention programs. However, to what extent it is necessary to adapt these programs to the context or the user remains an unanswered question. This study attempts to provide evidence on which type of customization has a greater impact. Using data from the evaluation of the Fénix Andalucía prevention program, we analyzed if a reduction in the significance quest will reduce violent narratives by ameliorating deviant networks using multilevel structural equation modeling. The results showed that the average impact in the educational centers was not significant, while the individual experience of the participants was. It is concluded that prevention programs would benefit from user-tailored programs that enhance individual experiences.
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Being left out by others is a painful experience that threatens basic needs. When people are excluded, they may merely distance themselves from those who have wronged them to avoid further rejection. However, some individuals may engage in compensatory actions to defend their self, their group, or the interplay between them in a way that could be a first step for radicalization leading to violence. How and when people opt for each strategy might vary depending on psychosocial mechanisms as well was macro-level cultural differences. Here, we focus on a mechanism useful for capturing who is more willing to fight or flee under social exclusion – identity fusion, a profound alignment between the personal self and a group, individual, value, or ideological conviction – and on a global cultural factor of relevance for the link between exclusion and extremism, as it is the distinction between WEIRD and non-WEIRD populations.
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The threat of extremist behavior is one of the important problems of the modern world. The theoretical aspect of the psychology of extremism and its manifestations has not been sufficiently developed, which gives rise to methodological difficulties in the study and measurement of extremist personality tendencies. The article presents the results of the authors' work on the systematization of information about modern methods of revealing a propensity to extremism and identifying persons loyal to extremist ideology. The existing criteria of extremism as a behavioral, cognitive and characterological phenomenon are also analyzed. The methods used to diagnose the factors associated with extremism are analyzed, and the general specificity is revealed. The authors provide a methodological rationale for each technique, describe the features of their application in practice, consider the psychometric parameters of the techniques, identify the advantages and limitations. An analytical tool has been developed — a comparative table of the analyzed methods according to the selected criteria.
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The rise in White nationalist ideology in America is one of the pressing issues of our times. In this article, we make the case that White nationalists both extol the talents and virtues of White Americans and idolize and romanticize a former White‐dominated America, while simultaneously condemning and demonizing the current state of America for Whites. This fundamentally ambivalent ideology contributes to dangerous downstream consequences such as fomenting violence against groups that threaten Whites’ status and resources and even calling for outright civil war. This article also examines the psychological impact of rapid demographic and cultural changes on groups in positions of power, and how these changes make some Whites, especially those who might already be suffering from instability, disenfranchisement, and loss, gravitate to groups who validate their fears and transform them into aggrieved entitlement and moral outrage. Finally, this article proposes policies that decision‐makers and other leaders can take to undo the foundational ideologies that White supremacy is built upon and to help curtail its spread.
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To promote early intervention strategies, Countering/Preventing Violent Extremism (C/PVE) policies internationally seek to encourage community reporting by ‘intimates’ about someone close to them engaging in terrorist planning. Yet historically, we have scant evidence around what either helps or hinders ‘intimates’ to share concerns with authorities. We address that deficit here through a ‘state of the art’ assessment of what we currently know about effective related C/PVE approaches to community reporting, based on key findings from a ground-breaking Australian study and its UK replication. The consistency of qualitative findings from nearly 100 respondents offers new paradigms for policy and practice.
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The potential of terrorists to re-offend after their release from prison is of much concern in many countries around the world. Yet, there is little research on terrorist recidivism, and risk factors that might contribute to it, as data concerning released offenders of terrorism is scarce. In this chapter, we investigate terrorist recidivism using a large dataset of offenders identified as “security offenders”, which are related to terrorism in Israel, in the years 2004–2017. While the overall rate of recidivism of this cohort is lower than the Israeli criminal recidivism rate, some risk factors affect security offenders similarly to other criminals. While some risk factors known to affect criminal recidivism, such as affiliation to criminal organizations and age, show similar patterns for terrorist recidivism, factors such as length of incarceration and type of crime, show different trends. We discuss the role of these factors within the Israeli and global context.
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Several studies have shed light on factors that contribute to radicalization. However, fewer studies have addressed the factors that contribute to deradicalization, especially with terrorist detainees as participants. The present study investigates the role of attitudes toward rehabilitation in deradicalization programs, and its role in predicting the outcome for these programs. We hypothesized that when terrorist detainees adopt alternative identities (identities alternative to their jihadist identity), their support for jihad as war will be lessened, even when they still hold jihadist ideology as their source of significance. To test this hypothesis, we obtained 89 interview profiles of actual terrorist detainees across 35 Indonesian prisons. We found that lesser support for jihad as war was predicted by a more positive attitude toward the deradicalization program, and this was mediated by the adoption of alternative identities. Further, the effect of the mediator on support for jihad as war was neither weakened nor strengthened by perceived significance of jihadist ideology. These findings suggest that even when a person possesses a strong ideological commitment to jihad, this may not manifest into violence when they adopt alternative identities and goals. These results were interpreted and discussed through goal systems theory and the multifinality account of radical behavior.
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Gatekeepers are those in a position to recognize, in others, potentially problematic presenting issues, and who are willing and able to connect those persons to relevant service providers. In the domain of violence prevention, they represent a network of those who can serve as ‘first responders’ with respect to helping those in need. Therefore, it is important to understand both the facilitators and inhibitors of gatekeeper intervention, or what has been termed ‘vicarious help-seeking:’ the intent to help others who appear in need of help, but who are not actively seeking help. The present set of studies demonstrated both an expansion of the theory of vicarious help-seeking and a replication of its original four tenets (Part 1). Part 2 examined how gatekeepers would prefer to intervene in a violence prevention context: their natural inclinations with respect to doing so. Part 3 examined reasons preventing gatekeepers from reaching out to a third-party for assistance. Part 4 further examined who–in addition to friends–might be most influential/effective, as gatekeepers.
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Currently German authorities estimate that about 230 German citizens have travelled to the civil war battlefields in Syria (‘Foreign Fighters’). The perceived threat results from the possibility of trained individuals with battlefield experience and contacts to international terrorist organizations returning with their Western passports to their home countries and either act as sleepers, active terrorists or recruiters for terrorist organizations. So far Western countries have not yet found an effective tool to stop or slow down the continuous stream of persons travelling abroad, for many different reasons. In addition the knowledge about the processes and careers leading to the departure from one’s home country to a war scenario is very limited. This article introduces one of the few civil society programs (‘HAYAT’) designed, among other tasks, to work in the close periphery of highly radicalized individuals and ‘Foreign Fighters’ - with the major goal to prevent these persons from leaving, prevent them from turning violent once they have left, and finally convince them to return to their home countries into a network closely coordinated with the authorities, but institutionally independent from them. HAYAT is a family counselling program available for every relative, friend or otherwise attached person (e.g. teacher) of individuals on the path of radicalization (violent and non-violent) at any stage. The unique methodology designed to work as a bridge between security authorities and civil society in regard to the ‘Foreign Fighters’ threat is the core of this article. In addition a short statistical overview on HAYAT’s cases of the first two years of work will be given.
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Presents an integrative theoretical framework to explain and to predict psychological changes achieved by different modes of treatment. This theory states that psychological procedures, whatever their form, alter the level and strength of self-efficacy. It is hypothesized that expectations of personal efficacy determine whether coping behavior will be initiated, how much effort will be expended, and how long it will be sustained in the face of obstacles and aversive experiences. Persistence in activities that are subjectively threatening but in fact relatively safe produces, through experiences of mastery, further enhancement of self-efficacy and corresponding reductions in defensive behavior. In the proposed model, expectations of personal efficacy are derived from 4 principal sources of information: performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological states. Factors influencing the cognitive processing of efficacy information arise from enactive, vicarious, exhortative, and emotive sources. The differential power of diverse therapeutic procedures is analyzed in terms of the postulated cognitive mechanism of operation. Findings are reported from microanalyses of enactive, vicarious, and emotive modes of treatment that support the hypothesized relationship between perceived self-efficacy and behavioral changes. (21/2 p ref)
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This article examines how expectancy of goal achievement influences the perceived instrumentality of means to a focal goal, above and beyond the influence of goal commitment. Based on goal-systems theory (Kruglanski et al., 2002, 2013), the present research found that expectancy of goal achievement positively predicts the perceived instrumentality of multifinal means, which compound value by fulfilling several goals simultaneously, and negatively predicts perceived instrumentality of counterfinal means, which afford greater expectancy of attaining a given goal, but are detrimental to alternative goals. Study 1 found correlational and Study 2 experimental evidence of this phenomenon. Study 3 evinced that expectancy of goal achievement was associated with the number of multifinal and counterfinal means generated for goal pursuit. Study 4 found that expectancy predicted whether people select to engage in multifinal (vs. counterfinal) means. Lastly, Study 5 demonstrated that concern for desirability versus feasibility is the mediating process whereby expectancy influences perceived means instrumentality.
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Among the defining characteristics of the 21st century's first decade has been the specter of terrorism that threatens world stability and security. Although the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as those in Bali (2002), Madrid (2004), and London (2005) attracted major attention, the problem of terrorism and political violence is considerably more dispersed as hundreds (Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, 2005) of terrorist groups carry out lethal attacks in various parts of the world on a nearly daily basis. Following the tragic events of the 9/11 in 2001, former President George W. Bush declared a global war on terror that is now in its 12th year. To date, the United States' counter-terrorism strategy deployed onto the world stage has claimed billions of dollars and thousands of lives, including those of innocent civilians (laconically described as “collateral damage”). There is no question that the determined struggle against terror by the US and its allies has had impressive successes: elimination or arrests of major Al-Qaeda leaders, dismantlement of terrorists' logistical infrastructures, disabling of their financial networks. However, despite all these achievements, several roadblocks remain en route to conciliation and harmony in intergroup relations. Indeed, experts disagree as to whether we are safer now than on the eve of 9/11 as Islamic extremism seems far from subsiding and radicalization seems on the rise in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. There is a growing danger that the Arab Spring is turning into a deadly winter, as the waves of democracy meet the rocks of fanaticism…
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Uncompromising wars, revolution, rights movements, and today’s global terrorism are in part driven by “devoted actors” who adhere to sacred, transcendent values that generate actions dissociated fromrationally expected risks and rewards. Studies in real-world conflicts show ways that devoted actors, who are unconditionally committed to sacred causes and whose personal identities are fused within a unique collective identity, willingly make costly sacrifices. This enables low-power groups to endure and often prevail against materially stronger foes. Explaining how devoted actors come to sacrifice for cause and comrades not only is a scientific goal but a practical imperative to address intergroup disputes that can spiral out of control in a rapidly interconnecting world of collapsing and conflicting cultural traditions. From the recent massive media-driven global political awakening, horizontal peer-to-peer transcultural niches, geographically disconnected, are emerging to replace vertical generation-to-generation territorial traditions. Devoted actors of the global jihadi archipelago militate within such a novel transcultural niche, which is socially tight, ideationally narrow, and globe spanning. Nevertheless, its evolutionarymaintenance depends on costly commitments to transcendental values, rituals and sacrifices, and parochial altruism, which may have deep roots even in the earliest and most traditional human societies. Fieldwork results from the Kurdish battlefront with the Islamic State are highlighted. © 2016 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
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This accessible new book looks at how and why individuals leave terrorist movements, and considers the lessons and implications that emerge from this process. Focusing on the tipping points for disengagement from groups such as Al Qaeda, the IRA and the UVF, this volume is informed by the dramatic and sometimes extraordinary accounts that the terrorists themselves offered to the author about why they left terrorism behind. The book examines three major issues: what we currently know about de-radicalisation and disengagement, how discussions with terrorists about their experiences of disengagement can show how exit routes come about, and how they then fare as 'ex-terrorists' away from the structures that protected them, what the implications of these findings are for law-enforcement officers, policy-makers and civil society on a global scale. Concluding with a series of thought-provoking yet controversial suggestions for future efforts at controlling terrorist behaviour, Walking Away From Terrorism provides an comprehensive introduction to disengagement and de-radicalisation and offers policymakers a series of considerations for the development of counter-radicalization and de-radicalisation processes. This book will be essential reading for students of terrorism and political violence, war and conflict studies, security studies and political psychology.