Violent Extremism in America


Book Description

Terrorism and ideologically inspired violence are persistent and serious threats to U.S. national security. This report uses interviews to explore why and how 32 individuals joined extremist organizations and how some of them exited these groups.




Former Extremists


Book Description

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This collection is the first on ex-extremists and combatants (Formers) in violence prevention work. While the engagement of Formers in violence prevention programs--especially in the context of countering and preventing violent extremism (P/CVE), and peacebuilding--has expanded across the world, their involvement has been controversial and contested. This volume captures a variety of work Formers are engaged in across a range of contexts, broadly divided into three themes on their effectiveness, ethical considerations, and implementation. Written by a range of authors with diverse perspectives including academics, former extremists, peer mentors, program leaders, and practicing psychologists, chapters include Formers in North American research, the role of former Northern Irish combatants in peacebuilding, collaborating with Formers, the ethical imperatives of engaging Formers in P/CVE efforts, and more. Taken together, the book ultimately offers a snapshot of the ongoing policy debates while contributing to the future direction of work involving Formers in violence prevention.




Proto-State Media Systems


Book Description

Proto-State Media Systems explores how decisions by contemporary violent extremist groups create, develop, and sustain media systems. Focusing on the cases of al-Qaeda and ISIS, this book showcases how standard media systems theory fails to fully explain the media systems of these organizations as a basis for building a revised theoretical lens that comprehends these emergent systems in the 21st century global media context. Utilizing constitutive and online networking theories, Winkler and El Damanhoury explore how militant proto-states create lasting, adaptable, identity-based systems that work to attract and sustain the attention of followers. The groups' appeals to transhistorical and transpatial identity formations in their media products reveal new insights about community formation and how we analyze media systems in the proto-state context. Recognizing that nation-states no longer exercise monopoly control over online and offline media systems, Proto-State Media Systems investigates how certain violent extremist groups bent on establishing sustained territorial and governing control over populations have revolutionized the media environment of the 21st century.




Radical


Book Description

Maajid Nawaz spent his teenage years listening to American hip-hop and learning about the radical Islamist movement spreading throughout Europe and Asia in the 1980s and 90s. At 16, he was already a ranking member in Hizb ut-Tahrir, a London-based Islamist group. He quickly rose through the ranks to become a top recruiter, a charismatic spokesman for the cause of uniting Islam’s political power across the world. Nawaz was setting up satellite groups in Pakistan, Denmark, and Egypt when he was rounded up in the aftermath of 9/11 along with many other radical Muslims. He was sent to an Egyptian prison where he was, fortuitously, jailed along with the assassins of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The 20 years in prison had changed the assassins’ views on Islam and violence; Maajid went into prison preaching to them about the Islamist cause, but the lessons ended up going the other way. He came out of prison four years later completely changed, convinced that his entire belief system had been wrong, and determined to do something about it. He met with activists and heads of state, built a network, and started a foundation, Quilliam, funded by the British government, to combat the rising Islamist tide in Europe and elsewhere, using his intimate knowledge of recruitment tactics in order to reverse extremism and persuade Muslims that the ‘narrative’ used to recruit them (that the West is evil and the cause of all of Muslim suffering), is false. Radical, first published in the UK, is a fascinating and important look into one man's journey out of extremism and into something else entirely. This U.S. edition contains a "Preface for US readers" and a new, updated epilogue.




Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization


Book Description

The fifteen chapters in this volume of Sociology of Crime, Law, and Deviance discuss a number of issues researchers in the fields of sociology, criminology, and criminal justice theorize, conceptualize, and measure racialization and counter-radicalization.




Reintegrating Extremists


Book Description

This book presents an in-depth analysis of how statutory and third sector organisations have faced the challenge of dealing with former ‘terrorists’. Offering a theoretically robust, empirically rich account of work with ex-prisoners and those considered ‘at risk’ of involvement in extremism in the United Kingdom, Marsden dissects the problems governments are facing in dealing with the effects of 'radicalisation'. Increasingly, governments are struggling with the challenge of dealing with those who have become involved in extremism, and yet, comparatively little is known about how and why people renounce violence. Nor are existing efforts to ‘deradicalise’ extremists well understood. Arguing that reintegration is a more appropriate framework than ‘deradicalisation’, Marsden looks in detail at the mechanisms by which people can be supported to move away from extremism. By drawing out implications for policy, practice and academic debates around disengagement from radical subcultures, this book makes a significant contribution to an issue only likely to grow in importance for scholars of criminological theory, terrorism and justice.




Understanding Deradicalization


Book Description

first comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of de-radicalization offers a coherent typology and methodology regarding the effects and concepts of de-radicalization programs will be of much interest to students of deradicalisation, counter-terrorism, criminology, radical Islam, security studies and IR




Countering Violent Extremism Through Public Health Practice


Book Description

Countering violent extremism consists of various prevention and intervention approaches to increase the resilience of communities and individuals to radicalization toward violent extremism, to provide nonviolent avenues for expressing grievances, and to educate communities about the threat of recruitment and radicalization to violence. To explore the application of health approaches in community-level strategies to countering violent extremism and radicalization, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a public workshop in September 2016. Participants explored the evolving threat of violent extremism and radicalization within communities across America, traditional versus health-centered approaches to countering violent extremism and radicalization, and opportunities for cross-sector and interdisciplinary collaboration and learning among domestic and international stakeholders and organizations. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.




Home, Land, Security


Book Description

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A “provocative and deeply reported look into the emerging field of deradicalization” (Esquire), told through the stories of former militants and the people working to bring them back into society What are the roots of radicalism? Journalist Carla Power came to this question well before the January 6, 2021, attack in Washington, D.C., turned our country’s attention to the problem of domestic radicalization. Her entry point was a different wave of radical panic—the way populists and pundits encouraged us to see the young people who joined ISIS or other terrorist organizations as simple monsters. Power wanted to chip away at the stereotypes by focusing not on what these young people had done but why: What drew them into militancy? What visions of the world—of home, of land, of security for themselves and the people they loved—shifted their thinking toward radical beliefs? And what visions of the world might bring them back to society? Power begins her journey by talking to the mothers of young men who’d joined ISIS in the UK and Canada; from there, she travels around the world in search of societies that are finding new and innovative ways to rehabilitate former extremists. We meet an American judge who has staked his career on finding new ways to handle terrorist suspects, a Pakistani woman running a game-changing school for former child soldiers, a radicalized Somali American who learns through literature to see beyond his Manichean beliefs, and a former neo-Nazi who now helps disarm white supremacists. Along the way Power gleans lessons that get her closer to answering the true question at the heart of her pursuit: Can we find a way to live together? An eye-opening, page-turning investigation, Home, Land, Security speaks to the rise of division and radicalization in all forms, both at home and abroad. In this richly reported and deeply human account, Carla Power offers new ways to overcome the rising tides of extremism, one human at a time.




How We Win


Book Description

“Drawing on her decades of experience, Pandith unweaves the tangled web of extremism and demonstrates how government officials, tech CEOs, and concerned citizens alike can do their part to defeat it.” – Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright There is a war being fought, and we are losing it. Despite the billions of dollars spent since 9/11 trying to defeat terrorist organizations, the so-called Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and other groups remain a terrifying geopolitical threat. In some ways the threat has grown worse: The 9/11 hijackers came from far away; the danger today can come from anywhere—from the other side of the world to across the street. Unable to stem recruitment, we seem doomed to a worsening struggle with a constantly evolving enemy that remains several steps ahead of us. Unfortunately, current policies seem almost guaranteed not to reduce extremist violence but instead to make it easier for terrorists to spread their hateful ideas, recruit new members, and carry out attacks. We actually possess the means right now to inoculate communities against extremist ideologies. In How We Win, Farah Pandith presents a revolutionary new analysis of global extremism as well as powerful but seldom-used strategies for vanquishing it. Drawing on her visits to eighty countries, the hundreds of interviews and focus groups she’s conducted around the world, and her high-level experience in the Bush and Obama administrations, Pandith argues for a paradigm shift in our approach to combat extremism, one that mobilizes the expertise and resources of diplomats, corporate leaders, mental health experts, social scientists, entrepreneurs, local communities, and, most of all, global youth themselves. There is a war being fought, and we can win it. This is how.