Understanding Terrorist Ideology
Testimony presented to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence by Kim Cragin of RAND on 12 Jun 07:
Understanding Terrorist Ideology
Quote:
Over the past twelve years, during the course of my research on terrorism and insurgency, I have explored the topic of terrorist ideology as it relates to what motivates individuals to become terrorists, as well as what influences communities to sympathize with terrorist groups. This research can be found in a number of RAND publications, including
Terrorism and Development, and more recently,
Dissuading Terror.
Both issues – individual motivations and community support – are important to understanding the challenges that extremist ideologies pose to US national security. For example, potential exists for terrorist groups to use various ideological arguments to persuade individuals to ‘pick up a gun’ or become terrorists themselves. Potential also exists for terrorist groups to use ideological arguments to garner financial or other support from local communities. And yet, despite this potential, it remains uncertain to what degree ideology actually influences individual motivations or community support. Indeed, our research suggests that the impact of ideology tends to vary country by country, community by community and often individual by individual....
The wasn't the only testimony presented; unfortunately the hearing transcripts aren't up on the committee website. If I find the others I'll post'em on this thread.
A book we may have missed?
I read this 'Think Progress' story today and wondered if the SWC community was aware of the book behind the title 'The Book That Really Explains ISIS (Hint: It's Not The Quran' and there is a thread, with two posts in 2007 about the book 'The Management of Savagery':http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/...not-the-quran/
From the story:
Quote:
... there is some evidence to suggest that ISIS’s overarching strategy is especially influenced by one book in particular — and no, it’s not the Qur’an.
In 2004, a PDF of a book entitled “
The Management Of Savagery” was posted online and circulated among Sunni jihadist circles. Scholars soon noticed that the book, which was published by an unknown author writing under the pseudonym “Abu Bakr Naji,” had become popular among many extremist groups such as al-Shabaab in Somalia, and was eventually translated into English for study in 2006 by William McCants, now the director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. The book, McCants told ThinkProgress, was written as an alternative to the decentralized, “leaderless” approach to jihadism popular in the mid-2000s. Instead of using isolated attacks on super powers all over the globe, “The Management Of Savagery” offered an expansive plan for how a group of Muslim militants could violently seize land and establish their own self-governing Islamic state — much like ISIS is trying to do today.