mick silver
19th March 2016, 12:23 PM
The Astonishingly Crap Science of ‘Counter-Extremism’Source: Nafeez Ahmed (https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-astonishingly-crap-science-of-counter-extremism-65810f8ac8e6#.3khujp7cp)
The science behind government strategies to fight radicalisation is so ridiculously crap that the most academically accurate concept to capture this absurd level of crappiness is ‘bullshit’
This story is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE (http://www.medium.com/insurge-intelligence/), a crowd-funded investigative journalism project for the global commons.A new United Nations report published this February has criticised prevalent approaches to countering ‘radicalisation’ as ineffective, conceptually flawed, and more likely to reinforce extremist narratives than prevent them.
The report to the UN Human Rights Council is authored by Ben Emmerson QC, the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter Terrorism and Human Rights.
Emmerson is a leading British lawyer, deputy High Court Judge, and British judge on the Residual Mechanism of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
His new report to the UN criticises “[m]any programmes directed at radicalisation” for being “based on a simplistic understanding of the process as a fixed trajectory to violent extremism with identifiable markers along the way.”
Despite volumes of research and huge expenditures, he points out, “there are no authoritative statistical data on the pathways towards individual radicalisation.”
To make matters worse, Emmerson concludes, “States have tended to focus on those [approaches] that are most appealing to them, shying away from the more complex issues, including political issues such as foreign policy and transnational conflicts.” This has led to a misguided “focus on religious ideology as the driver of terrorism and extremism”, and an escalating resort to repressive and discriminatory measures targeted at Muslim communities.
Far from preventing extremism, this is fuelling it. Emmerson refers to an earlier warning from the UN Human Rights Commissioner that “any more repressive [an] approach would have the reverse effect of reinforcing the narrative of extremist ideologies”, and warns that this is precisely what is now coming to pass.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*mQP0BurLJRC9dybpMRpspg.jpeg
80% of terrorism studies are bullshitYet this important UN report barely scratches the surface of how truly crap the state of the science is when it comes to understanding what ‘radicalisation’ even is, let alone countering it.
Over thirty years ago, Alex P. Schmid, former Office-in-Charge of the UN’s Terrorism Prevention Branch and Albert Jongman of Leiden University’s PIOOM Foundation (Interdisciplinary Research Programme on Root Causes of Human Rights Violations) reviewed over 6,000 academic studies of terrorism published between 1968 and 1988. Shockingly, as they explained in their seminal book Political Terrorism, they found that “perhaps as much as 80 percent of the literature is not research-based in any rigorous sense.”
Of course, that’s a very polite, typically academic way of putting it.
The thing is, when an academic tells you that your work is “not research-based in any rigorous sense”, what she’s basically saying is that your work has very little, if any, scholarly merit. It doesn’t actually make an original contribution to knowledge.
In short, for all intents and purposes, it’s bullshit.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*Z-7zXZEtXzqSPfO_zukGcQ.jpeg
When evidence is lacking: recycleIn any other discipline, academic research that is “not research-based in any rigorous sense” would mean you fail to get your degree — let alone fail to get published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Not in terrorism studies.
In terrorism studies, decades of ‘scholarship’ that is “not research-based in any rigorous sense” is being continuously recycled to regurgitate ‘new’ theories and policy recommendations which, however, have little if any evidential support.
By 2001, Professor Andrew Silke of the University of East London — a counter terrorism specialist who advises the UN and the UK government’s Cabinet Office — wrote in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence that the situation had still barely improved.
Despite decades of scholarship, he concluded, terrorism studies still struggled “in its efforts to explain terrorism or to provide findings of genuine predictive value.”
Most of the ‘scientific’ literature on terrorism, Silke found, recycled information from previous secondary sources, with only about 20% of publications offering genuinely original and novel data.
When Silke updated his analysis of the field in his contribution to the 2009 Routledge anthology, Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda, he found that despite some marginal progress, the field was still characterised largely by an over-reliance on secondary sources and a dearth of empirical data.
Numerous other terrorism experts have admitted this problem. A 2006 report by the NATO Programme for Security in Science, Tangled Roots: Social and Psychological Factors in the Genesis of Terrorism, examined 1535 academic papers on terrorism between 2000 and 2004. It concluded:
“… a careful review reveals that genuine new data was reported in less than 10% of that subgroup.”Other reviews have been even more damning. That year, a major study of the literature in Campbell Systematic Reviews concluded that “only 3% of articles from peer-reviewed sources appeared to be based on some form of empirical analysis.” Another 1% consisted of case studies, and the remaining 96% consisted essentially of “thought pieces.”
Which means that a whopping 96% was recycled bullshit.
That was ten years ago, so have things gotten better since then?
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*gCjWAct9CP639FHiNv_Bwg.jpeg
Pseudo-science echo chamberNot really.
In 2011, Professor Adam Dolnik, Director of Terrorism Studies at the Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention (CTCP) at the University of Wollongong in Australia, observed in Perspectives on Terrorism that the continual dependence on secondary sources means that terrorism studies represents a “highly unreliable closed and circular research system, functioning in a constantly reinforcing feedback loop.”
The continual transmission of contradictory truisms within the field, has meant that terrorism experts are not really advancing knowledge of terrorism or extremism, and how to deal with it — they’re just repeating the same stale assumptions and prescriptions again and again.
Of course, that’s not to say that all terrorism research is useless. There is good research going on — but it’s few and far between, and the best work doesn’t necessarily impact on policy.
In any other discipline, the chronic inability to produce meaningful and original contributions to knowledge would justify wholesale dismissal as the work of cranks and pseudo-scientists.
Unfortunately, the one saving grace is that when the best counter-terrorism specialists are able to apply scientific standards to the field, among the most consistent findings is that the field is full of very serious, beard-stroking, speculative conjecture dressed up as ‘theory.’
In 2013, a background note by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague conceded that, despite some important improvements in the gathering of empirical data:
“A lack of research based on primary sources has been one of the major impediments to progress in the field of (counter-) terrorism studies… As numerous leading experts have warned, the consequences of an overreliance on secondary sources of information, such as newspapers, has led to a great amount of theorising based on a perilously small empirical foundation.”That year, the Scientific Approach to Finding Indicators of and Responses to Radicalisation (SAFIRE) project of the leading Pentagon contractor RAND Europe similarly found that despite offering “numerous insights into the process of violent radicalisation… only a minority of the literature consisted of empirical and/or causal research, which could explain the causes of violent extremism and terrorism.”
Ironically, this has the effect that all these wonderful “insights” may really just be reflections of the prejudices of those involved in the research:
“In other words, one can only have limited confidence that the results from the literature accurately reflect the characteristics of the violent extremist and terrorist population, and not the assumptions and biases of those that have reported the characteristics of violent extremists and terrorists to the researchers.”This is another polite, academic way of admitting that the bulk of the literature is full of unsubstantiated, self-referential bullshit — while also trying to project a semblance of scholarly credibility.
“The lack of causal research in relation to factors associated with violent extremism and terrorism suggests that the findings from the literature cannot, on the whole, be used to explain what drives people to violent extremism or terrorism or to predict outcomes,” concluded the SAFIRE report.
Translation: the, ahem, “findings” from the literature cannot, on the whole, be treated as actual scientific “findings” that can “explain” or “predict” anything concerning extremism or terrorism.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*yBFD3XCRuC6qOtqG_8M-kQ.png
Forensic psychiatrist and former CIA operations officer Marc Sageman was far more harsh in his 2014 review (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09546553.2014.895649) published in Terrorism and Political Violence.
“Despite over a decade of government funding and thousands of newcomers to the field of terrorist research, we are no closer to answering the simple question of ‘What leads a person to turn to political violence?’” he lamented.
He blamed this “state of stagnation” on government funding of academic research while still withholding access to sensitive primary source information guarded by the intelligence community:
“This has led to an explosion of speculations with little empirical grounding in academia, which has the methodological skills but lacks data for a major breakthrough… Nor has the intelligence community been able to achieve any breakthrough because of the structure and dynamic of this community and its lack of
The science behind government strategies to fight radicalisation is so ridiculously crap that the most academically accurate concept to capture this absurd level of crappiness is ‘bullshit’
This story is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE (http://www.medium.com/insurge-intelligence/), a crowd-funded investigative journalism project for the global commons.A new United Nations report published this February has criticised prevalent approaches to countering ‘radicalisation’ as ineffective, conceptually flawed, and more likely to reinforce extremist narratives than prevent them.
The report to the UN Human Rights Council is authored by Ben Emmerson QC, the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter Terrorism and Human Rights.
Emmerson is a leading British lawyer, deputy High Court Judge, and British judge on the Residual Mechanism of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
His new report to the UN criticises “[m]any programmes directed at radicalisation” for being “based on a simplistic understanding of the process as a fixed trajectory to violent extremism with identifiable markers along the way.”
Despite volumes of research and huge expenditures, he points out, “there are no authoritative statistical data on the pathways towards individual radicalisation.”
To make matters worse, Emmerson concludes, “States have tended to focus on those [approaches] that are most appealing to them, shying away from the more complex issues, including political issues such as foreign policy and transnational conflicts.” This has led to a misguided “focus on religious ideology as the driver of terrorism and extremism”, and an escalating resort to repressive and discriminatory measures targeted at Muslim communities.
Far from preventing extremism, this is fuelling it. Emmerson refers to an earlier warning from the UN Human Rights Commissioner that “any more repressive [an] approach would have the reverse effect of reinforcing the narrative of extremist ideologies”, and warns that this is precisely what is now coming to pass.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*mQP0BurLJRC9dybpMRpspg.jpeg
80% of terrorism studies are bullshitYet this important UN report barely scratches the surface of how truly crap the state of the science is when it comes to understanding what ‘radicalisation’ even is, let alone countering it.
Over thirty years ago, Alex P. Schmid, former Office-in-Charge of the UN’s Terrorism Prevention Branch and Albert Jongman of Leiden University’s PIOOM Foundation (Interdisciplinary Research Programme on Root Causes of Human Rights Violations) reviewed over 6,000 academic studies of terrorism published between 1968 and 1988. Shockingly, as they explained in their seminal book Political Terrorism, they found that “perhaps as much as 80 percent of the literature is not research-based in any rigorous sense.”
Of course, that’s a very polite, typically academic way of putting it.
The thing is, when an academic tells you that your work is “not research-based in any rigorous sense”, what she’s basically saying is that your work has very little, if any, scholarly merit. It doesn’t actually make an original contribution to knowledge.
In short, for all intents and purposes, it’s bullshit.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*Z-7zXZEtXzqSPfO_zukGcQ.jpeg
When evidence is lacking: recycleIn any other discipline, academic research that is “not research-based in any rigorous sense” would mean you fail to get your degree — let alone fail to get published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Not in terrorism studies.
In terrorism studies, decades of ‘scholarship’ that is “not research-based in any rigorous sense” is being continuously recycled to regurgitate ‘new’ theories and policy recommendations which, however, have little if any evidential support.
By 2001, Professor Andrew Silke of the University of East London — a counter terrorism specialist who advises the UN and the UK government’s Cabinet Office — wrote in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence that the situation had still barely improved.
Despite decades of scholarship, he concluded, terrorism studies still struggled “in its efforts to explain terrorism or to provide findings of genuine predictive value.”
Most of the ‘scientific’ literature on terrorism, Silke found, recycled information from previous secondary sources, with only about 20% of publications offering genuinely original and novel data.
When Silke updated his analysis of the field in his contribution to the 2009 Routledge anthology, Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda, he found that despite some marginal progress, the field was still characterised largely by an over-reliance on secondary sources and a dearth of empirical data.
Numerous other terrorism experts have admitted this problem. A 2006 report by the NATO Programme for Security in Science, Tangled Roots: Social and Psychological Factors in the Genesis of Terrorism, examined 1535 academic papers on terrorism between 2000 and 2004. It concluded:
“… a careful review reveals that genuine new data was reported in less than 10% of that subgroup.”Other reviews have been even more damning. That year, a major study of the literature in Campbell Systematic Reviews concluded that “only 3% of articles from peer-reviewed sources appeared to be based on some form of empirical analysis.” Another 1% consisted of case studies, and the remaining 96% consisted essentially of “thought pieces.”
Which means that a whopping 96% was recycled bullshit.
That was ten years ago, so have things gotten better since then?
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*gCjWAct9CP639FHiNv_Bwg.jpeg
Pseudo-science echo chamberNot really.
In 2011, Professor Adam Dolnik, Director of Terrorism Studies at the Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention (CTCP) at the University of Wollongong in Australia, observed in Perspectives on Terrorism that the continual dependence on secondary sources means that terrorism studies represents a “highly unreliable closed and circular research system, functioning in a constantly reinforcing feedback loop.”
The continual transmission of contradictory truisms within the field, has meant that terrorism experts are not really advancing knowledge of terrorism or extremism, and how to deal with it — they’re just repeating the same stale assumptions and prescriptions again and again.
Of course, that’s not to say that all terrorism research is useless. There is good research going on — but it’s few and far between, and the best work doesn’t necessarily impact on policy.
In any other discipline, the chronic inability to produce meaningful and original contributions to knowledge would justify wholesale dismissal as the work of cranks and pseudo-scientists.
Unfortunately, the one saving grace is that when the best counter-terrorism specialists are able to apply scientific standards to the field, among the most consistent findings is that the field is full of very serious, beard-stroking, speculative conjecture dressed up as ‘theory.’
In 2013, a background note by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague conceded that, despite some important improvements in the gathering of empirical data:
“A lack of research based on primary sources has been one of the major impediments to progress in the field of (counter-) terrorism studies… As numerous leading experts have warned, the consequences of an overreliance on secondary sources of information, such as newspapers, has led to a great amount of theorising based on a perilously small empirical foundation.”That year, the Scientific Approach to Finding Indicators of and Responses to Radicalisation (SAFIRE) project of the leading Pentagon contractor RAND Europe similarly found that despite offering “numerous insights into the process of violent radicalisation… only a minority of the literature consisted of empirical and/or causal research, which could explain the causes of violent extremism and terrorism.”
Ironically, this has the effect that all these wonderful “insights” may really just be reflections of the prejudices of those involved in the research:
“In other words, one can only have limited confidence that the results from the literature accurately reflect the characteristics of the violent extremist and terrorist population, and not the assumptions and biases of those that have reported the characteristics of violent extremists and terrorists to the researchers.”This is another polite, academic way of admitting that the bulk of the literature is full of unsubstantiated, self-referential bullshit — while also trying to project a semblance of scholarly credibility.
“The lack of causal research in relation to factors associated with violent extremism and terrorism suggests that the findings from the literature cannot, on the whole, be used to explain what drives people to violent extremism or terrorism or to predict outcomes,” concluded the SAFIRE report.
Translation: the, ahem, “findings” from the literature cannot, on the whole, be treated as actual scientific “findings” that can “explain” or “predict” anything concerning extremism or terrorism.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*yBFD3XCRuC6qOtqG_8M-kQ.png
Forensic psychiatrist and former CIA operations officer Marc Sageman was far more harsh in his 2014 review (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09546553.2014.895649) published in Terrorism and Political Violence.
“Despite over a decade of government funding and thousands of newcomers to the field of terrorist research, we are no closer to answering the simple question of ‘What leads a person to turn to political violence?’” he lamented.
He blamed this “state of stagnation” on government funding of academic research while still withholding access to sensitive primary source information guarded by the intelligence community:
“This has led to an explosion of speculations with little empirical grounding in academia, which has the methodological skills but lacks data for a major breakthrough… Nor has the intelligence community been able to achieve any breakthrough because of the structure and dynamic of this community and its lack of