Denying ISIL Legitimacy and the problem of Radical Returnees

[flamingdem]

http://www.juancole.com/2014/10/denying-legitimacy-returnees.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

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How then, should states deal with their errant sons, who choose to return home once the conflict has lost its glamour and appeal?

Essentially, there are really only three options on the table.

Firstly, states could potentially opt to revoke citizenship. The Canadian government has just announced precisely that, citing its long-established Canadian Passport Order, which gives officials the right to terminate citizens’ travel papers. However, for most countries, this is likely to be a nonstarter. Unless the accused happened to possess dual nationality, it would be deemed illegal to render a person stateless under existing UN conventions and therefore violate international law, as British governmental lawyers recently established. Moreover, IS has issued new passports to their fighters, many of whom publicly burnt their original national identity documents in response. And so invalidating citizenship would inadvertently place Islamic State’s claims to sovereignty and allegiance on equal footing with bona fide nation-states, and therefore only serve to reinforce the perception of IS as a legitimate alternative polity in the international order.

The second option would be to rehabilitate returnees by disengaging them from violence (commonly referred to as de-radicalization). The British government, in the panicked wake of the Jihadi John situation, recently announced that British jihadists returning from Iraq and Syria would be forced to attend “de-radicalization” programs, “in order to reverse their warped brainwashing.” Whilst this strategy is far preferable to rendering individuals stateless, for those of us who study radicalization, and attempt to understand the heady appeal that ISIS, Al Qaeda or indeed any form of violent extremism holds for some young people, these sorts of pronouncements do pose some concerns.

For a start, the term radicalization itself is highly problematic, being born out of necessity in the post-9/11, and particularly, post-7/7 world, in which the alarming inability of policy makers to explain the advent of home-grown terrorism to an increasingly anxious and accusing public led to the rise of the term as a means of encapsulating the phenomenon in an inscrutable but self-explanatory bubble. In other words, radicalization gave us a tidy means of packaging our uncertainty and incomprehension without necessarily engaging with or interrogating why these things might be happening. So, the underlying mechanisms and factors involved in radicalization are still not at all well understood by academics. In fact, many scholars have critiqued the unhelpfulness of the term, with some even calling into question the phenomenon’s existence. Consequently, if we are not quite sure what causes radicalization, or even of what it actually is, then the prospect of reverse-engineering a viable remedy in response (i.e. de-radicalization), remains an unlikely possibility.

More problematically, radicalization and de-radicalization have functional analogues in now-obsolete terms like “brainwashing” and its antonym “de-programming.” The former was extensively employed during the 1960s and ’70s to describe and explain the appeal of religious sects, cults and new-age movements to young people, whereas the latter described the unethical coercive interventions made by their families and psychotherapists to reverse and rescue them from their “lifestyle choices.” Needless to say, both of these controversial concepts have been comprehensively debunked since then, and have now dropped out of common parlance.

So what, then, does this bode for de-radicalization strategies? Well, many countries, including Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Singapore, Germany, Yemen and the UK, have experimented extensively with these types of interventions, with varying degrees of success. However, what is now patently clear is that many “successful” de-radicalization programs have not de-radicalized extremists per se, but rather, have instead disengaged them from violence at home. In other words, they have simply modified behavior using a range of incentives, rather than fundamentally altering beliefs and attitudes. The Saudis, for example, who run one of the most lauded programs, have enjoyed some success by throwing money at the problem, financing apartments, weddings and new lifestyles for would-be Jihadist penitents, in attempts to engender loyalty to the regime by acting as the magnanimous paternalistic state. Ironically, the Saudis used the same strategy to forestall the Arab Spring from gaining traction within the Kingdom, extending additional benefits worth around $127 billion to citizens, in order to assuage political and economic dissent.

[ZombieHorde]

1. A fun article.

Thanks for posting.

[flamingdem]

2. I like this part:

Ironically, the Saudis used the same strategy to forestall the Arab Spring from gaining traction within the Kingdom, extending additional benefits worth around $127 billion to citizens, in order to assuage political and economic dissent.

* Hey I'll act radical for some of that bling