http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2016/05/beat-isis-we-must-think-smaller/128243/?oref=d_brief_nl
People become radicalized when they lack hope, jobs, and purpose. Local investments can break the cycle.
Last month, the United Nations held a large conference
in Geneva to discuss its plan to prevent violent extremism; that same
day in Washington, D.C., two federal contractors with experience in
peacebuilding held a conference on the same subject, at which DHS
Secretary Johnson and Sen. Cory Booker delivered remarks. Our own
non-profit presented at the latter event; we spoke about how to use data
in programs to prevent radicalization among people who may join groups
like ISIL. Yet there was an elephant in each of these elegant conference rooms.Justin Richmond is the Founder and Executive Director of the
impl. project, a non-profit that facilitates data-driven, community-led
stability and violence prevention programming. Before starting impl.
project, Justin worked as a forward deployed engineer at Palantir
Technologies, where he led ...
Full Bio
For all the lip service given to breaking the cycle of radicalization
where it starts—at the local level—the global leaders on the topic have
done almost nothing to empower such action.We know enough about recruitment for ISIS and its ilk to know that there is no single way individuals radicalize. We also know it involves some combination of ideological, psychological, and community-based factors. People flocking to Syria to join terrorist groups tend to be radical before they are religious, and tend to be motivated more by seeking personal agency than by any lofty ideology. Our work involves looking at these local community factors through the eyes of community members, using data to map the lifecycle of recruitment to violence, looking at the root causes among community factors.
For example, we asked people in the small Philippines village of Barira what their community’s problems were and what should be done to solve them. As we gathered data, a story became clear. Young men are pulled out of school to work unsustainable farming jobs, the girls grow up and move out of the community for college, the young men grow up with unsustainable jobs and no education. They feel hopeless and seek drugs to dull the pain, and then they fill that void of hopelessness, gaining personal agency by joining local violent groups who offer them a sense of purpose—and sometimes incentives to fuel their addictions. (Read our report.)
Global leaders keep having the same
conversation: that we should care about the causes of radicalization.
But it is time to turn talk into action.
See also: Leave Root Causes Aside—Destroy the ISIS ‘State’
Related: America Can’t Do Much About ISIS
As Sen. Booker said at the CVE Symposium, which was sponsored by the International Peace and Security Institute and Creative Associates,
“In God I trust…everyone else show me data.” We agree—but how can
people in the field, like we are, do that when data fails to be a
fundamental part of international development, whose funds are small to
begin with?Soon, our non-profit, the impl. project, will be buying a solar dryer for the desperate people in Barira. It will cost $6,000. Meanwhile, the military effort to counter ISIL currently costs $11.6 million per day, and will do little or nothing to break the long-term cycle of radicalization that has made our struggle against terrorism a generational one. It may even exacerbate the problem by accidentally feeding a narrative that the West is at war with Islam.
We were pleased to contribute to the recent conference, but we need more than conferences now—we need concrete action, and an industry supported by both private and public funding to truly address the root causes of violence.
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