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I’m still seized with the ‘debate’ on poverty and terrorism that erupted here yesterday because of ~that~ tweet. It made me reflect on what I know (or think I know) about this issue. Join me for a Saturday morning thread on poverty, relative deprivation, and terrorism: /n
1) When I worked in government, we had a big problem. We had many radicalized individuals (I can’t say how many, but it was more than we could reasonably handle); but we also knew that not all of them were serious. We knew that some proportion were all talk. But how to know who?
2) We went in search of any information that could help us narrow this down. One of the possible avenues that might help? Economic status and relative wealth.
3) This seemed promising: it was measurable, we could reasonably expect to collect data on this, and it could help us disaggregate our “sample” (i.e. our subjects of investigation).
4) I started with the macro-level analyses on ‘causes of terrorism’. These are large-N studies that examine social, economic, development (etc) factors. This was obviously too high-level for my work, but I wanted to understand the landscape.
5) To date, I still think Piazza has the best article on this https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343310397404
6) He finds that affluence within society affects the amount of domestic terrorism a country suffers, but that the economic status of a country’s minority groups has a bigger effect than overall economic status of a country.
7) This was something, but definitely not specific enough for my purposes. (Side note: how do we then interpret this finding for a non-minority group in one of the world’s wealthiest countries?)
8) I figured I needed to look at radicalization. At the time, this literature was all over the place (and unsatisfying), so when this piece came out in 2015 (well into my work), it was a welcome summary. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2015.1051375
9) The authors talk about grievances, networks, ideologies, enabling environments and support structures as the pieces of the radicalization puzzle. This fit with my observations of our cases.
10) I had a framework to explain what I was seeing, but still no answer to the specificity problem. For this, we had to conduct in-depth case studies of cases of mobilization to violence: essentially looking through the entire case file of individuals who had “done something”.
11) As I had a background in terrorist financing, I took the lead on looking for factors relating to money and economic situation. What I found was that economic factors and relative deprivation in some cases was part of the radicalization puzzle for some individuals.
12) However, a lack of funds was also protective: it’s hard to build a big bomb or travel to join a terrorist group if you’re actually poor. Lack of money delays or reduces the size of terrorist attacks. (Which also reflects some of the literature on civil wars and opportunity).
13) But here’s the thing, and I think it’s relevant in what we’re talking about today (that kidnapping plot): economic deprivation is HIGHLY subjective and individual.
14) It’s a function of how much money people around you have, how much money you think you ~should~ have, and how much money you actually have access to. Also, some people don’t seem to care about it at all.
15) So as a predictive factor for individual-level of analysis of terrorism, I find poverty / relative deprivation to be useless. On the other hand, financial analysis is useful if you think an attack is being planned – it can tell you a lot about potential capabilities.
