There is more to terrorism than poverty

NAIROBI: Ever since the terror attack on Garissa University College, there has been much commentary on why an increasing number of young Kenyan males have joined Al Shabaab.

 

Much of the discourse taking place in the media is centered on the view that these young men are attracted to terrorist groups as a result of economic frustrations; in other words, because they are poor.

These views are based on the frustration-aggression hypothesis. This school of thought, in brief, states that aggression happens as a result of frustration and that frustration always results in aggression. While it is not surprising that this view is now widely accepted, it is dangerous to buy into it without considering other push-and-pull factors driving terrorism.

Focusing only on economic factors as the main driver of attraction to terrorist groups has serious implications when it comes to designing effective interventions to prevent more attacks from happening on Kenyan soil.

Human behaviour is influenced by many factors and it is important to avoid linear attribution when seeking solutions to problems. Social psychologists have put forth different arguments for why people join different types of groups, including gangs and terrorist organisations. One perspective holds that people join groups to satisfy needs. These needs fall on a wide spectrum: survival, psychological and interpersonal, among others.

Psychologically, individuals may join groups in order to satisfy their need for affiliation, the desire to feel connected. Individuals may also join groups in order to satisfy their need for power, or the capacity to influence other people. Individuals may join terrorist organisations in order to maintain positive relations with others of like mind that are already in the groups; people who hold similar beliefs, opinions and attitudes about different factors such as religion, the world, governments, among many others.

Research by social psychologists has found that individuals who join terrorist groups tend to hold a strong dichotomous worldviews. To them, institutions are either good or evil and people are either victims or oppressors. Such people, in an effort to measure and justify their strongly held views, will sometimes seek to affiliate with like-minded individuals who tend to be members of terrorist groups.

Upon joining the terrorist groups, there are certain psychological conditions that are created that facilitate the perpetration of violent acts. Researchers have found that terrorist groups do an effective job of stripping away the previous identity of recruits. Recruits are indoctrinated with constant illustrations of propaganda.

This indoctrination reinforces the central message of the group which is, typically, that the group is in a fight, a struggle of a moral nature, one that they must win in order to defend or save something that is threatened; in the case of Al Shabaab, a religion.

Indoctrination, in terrorist groups, involves an element that is central to the inhumane acts that terrorists carry out; dehumanisation. Dehumanisation is said to happen when human beings consider others to not be human. Terror organisations, through indoctrination, convince their recruits that certain individuals or groups exist outside the realm of humanity and are not worthy of empathy, sympathy, love and care.

Typically, the same individuals and groups that are not considered human are also said to be the source of oppression to the terrorists. This thinking then makes it easier and more justifiable to be aggressive against individuals of other religions or groups of people who do not share the same worldview as the terrorists.

In the case of the Garissa University College, the targets of the terrorists, the students who got killed, were perceived to be symbols of an evil State (Kenya) or representatives of oppressors (Christians). This explains why it was so easy for the terrorists to kill and maim.

This intense ‘black-and-white’ thinking about the world is what sometimes attracts people to terrorist groups. Once the recruits have joined the group, it is propaganda and indoctrination that create conditions that allow individuals that were once gentle and caring, to kill and destroy without a care in the world. It is not necessarily economic deprivation that drives young adults to join terrorist groups.

The stereotype that terrorists in our country are necessarily being recruited because they are economically deprived is the very mindset that had many Kenyans surprised that one of the gunmen in the Garissa attack, Abdirahim Abdullahi, was a highly educated suave young man who had impressive social networks.

He did not fit the now widely held view of a terrorist.

Hopefully, this has got many Kenyans re-thinking their view of why individuals choose to become terrorists. While it is true that many of the foot soldiers in terrorist organisations may be from poor backgrounds, it is also a fact that in those same communities the terrorists came from, there are many that have chosen not to associate with terrorism.

This means that there are other factors at play that attract people to joining terror groups. We need to understand these factors.