Stern Publishes Journal Paper on Recruitment of Extremists
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent journal paper on the psychological and social factors motivating young people to join extremist groups and how that knowledge relates to the recruitment of individuals into ISIS.
Stern’s paper, entitled “Radicalization to Extremism and Mobilization to Violence: What Have We Learned and What Can We Do about It?,” was published in the November 2016 edition of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
From the text of the journal:
How are individuals mobilized to join terrorist groups (Kruglanski et al. 2014, 69–93)? How can the U.S. government make use of what scholars have learned about the process of mobilization to develop better policy responses? The field of terrorism studies, or “terrorology,” as it is sometimes called, has exploded since the 9/11 attacks (Silke and Schmidt-Petersen 2015; McCauley and Moskalenko 2014; Sageman 2004). Research has improved, partly as a result of an increase in government funding, and because significantly more data are available. Scholars from many disciplines are now contributing to the literature, but most of the government funding has been used to produce incidentlevel databases or quantitative analyses (Sageman 2004, 565–80; McCauley and Moskalenko 2011);2 few studies have addressed the question of how individuals are mobilized to become terrorists. Although this article’s focus is the relatively understudied topic of individual mobilization, it is still helpful to begin with a review of societal conditions that correlate with terrorism.
We are not able definitively to identify so-called root causes of terrorism, whether top-down (from society) or bottom-up (from the individual), but scholars are beginning to find correlations at the level of groups and societies (Crenshaw 2000).3 For example, high male/female ratios (Hudson and Den Boer 2002) and youth bulges (Urdal 2006) have been shown to be risk factors for internal war or terrorism.
You can read the entire journal paper here.
Stern’s main focus is on perpetrators of violence and the possible connections between trauma and terror. She has written on terrorist groups across religions and ideologies, among them neo-Nazis, Islamists, anarchists, and white supremacists. She has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorists. Learn more about her here.