For 25 years, enormous efforts went into identifying the future terrorist. Childhoods, education, religion, poverty, prisons, internet histories, psychology – few areas of public policy have been studied with such determination. The conclusion is unsatisfying. There is no reliable profile. (Opens in new window) Radicalisation is highly individual, non-linear and shaped by countless personal experiences.
But while predicting who will embrace violence has proved remarkably difficult, identifying where violent movements flourish has become much easier.
The pattern is consistent (Opens in new window). Extremism thrives where unresolved conflict, political repression, human rights abuses, discrimination, corruption, weak state legitimacy and the absence of peaceful avenues for redress create fertile ground for violence. Extremist organisations rarely invent these grievances. They inherit them, weaponise them and, all too often, the state supplies the raw material.
That should not surprise us. Countries most afflicted by violent extremism are also among those experiencing armed conflict, political terror and severe human rights abuses. Repression recruits more effectively than propaganda. While state violence never excuses extremist violence, it often helps explain why extremist organisations continue to find recruits long after their ideology should have lost its appeal.
The state’s role extends beyond repression. Sometimes it becomes an active participant.
Popular culture once made this seem almost heroic. In the 1987 James Bond film The Living Daylights, Bond joins forces with Afghan mujahideen fighting Soviet troops. The Taliban did not yet exist but the scene now feels like a relic of an era when armed Islamist movements could be neatly divided into “our extremists” and “theirs”.
The distinction was always more convenient than real.
States have long funded, armed, sheltered and manipulated violent groups when it suited their strategic interests. During the Cold War, the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported Afghan fighters against Soviet forces. Pakistan (Opens in new window) has long been accused of distinguishing between militant groups that threaten the Pakistani state and those seen as advancing its interests in Afghanistan or India. Across Asia (Opens in new window), governments have at various times tolerated militias, empowered vigilantes or cultivated proxy forces while simultaneously presenting themselves as the defenders of stability.
The relationship between states and violent extremism has always been more complicated than official rhetoric allows.
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