MUST READ: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SOURCES OF ISLAMIC TERRORISM

The Psychological Sources of Islamic Terrorism
By Michael J. Mazarr
Alienation and identity in the Arab world

The threats we are now confronting have roots in surprising places. And yet, even after September 11, and now post-Operation Iraqi Freedom, national security by and large continues to be defined in the traditional way. Threats are concrete, specific, and grounded in material capabilities. At issue, for the most part, are political-military questions such as power, territory, alliances, credibility, and prestige. Most important, the response when challenged is to deploy the tried and true elements of realpolitik — military action, coalition building, threats and promises, intervention overt and covert.

But there is an inherently psychological character to the war on terrorism that remains poorly appreciated: The security threats the United States faces today have everything to do with the pressures of modernity and globalization, the diaphanous character of identity, the burden of choice, and the vulnerability of the alienated. That is not all that they have to do with, and the influence of psychological factors lies in a larger context of socioeconomic, cultural, demographic, and other realities. Yet those material issues become most relevant, and most dangerous, when they are breathing life into latent psychological distress.

This diagnosis is hardly new. Everyone these days seems to be talking about the human effects of modernization and globalization, and the ways in which frustration, rage, and ultimately terrorism spring up from the collision of the new and the traditional. Works connecting radical extremist Islam to a reaction against modernity have been around for decades; many have tended to lay this phenomenon alongside the concomitant rise of fundamentalist strains in other religions. Yet the full implications of this widely drawn insight have not touched U.S. national security strategy and policy. What needs special attention, in fact, is what this diagnosis has to say about the cure — because it is an open question, one past which we have rushed in an understandable desire to strike back at evil, whether or not phenomena that are fundamentally psychological in character can be defeated with military power or law enforcement efforts.

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Pertinent Links:

1) The Psychological Sources of Islamic Terrorism