Thursday, December 16, 2010

The Swedish suicide bomber - when do political radicals turn to violence?

Since the attempted suicide bombing in Stockholm, Sweden, last weekend, the debate is raging about what the cause of this political violence can be, with too many articles published throughout the Swedish media landscape for me to refer here. Simplified, one can say that there are two basic modes of explanation:

a) the cause is inherent to Islam, or at least radical political Islam. It's a question of a totalitarian ideology that is a threat to all of the Western world, or the world of entrenched democracies (the two are treated as synonymous in this view).

b) the cause is poverty and social exclusion of Muslims, which leads desperate people to commit desperate acts.

Both of these modes of explanation, in my view, contain some interesting ideas, yet both are also very reductionist and the simplifications they present are potentially more harmful than helpful for a more nuanced understanding of the processes that lead certain people to turn to violence and terrorism for political reasons.

For a more sophisticated understanding, I highly recommend reading David Laitin's piece "National revivals and violence" from 1999 (in Bowen, John and Petersen, Roger (eds.) Critical Comparison in Politics and Culture, NY: Cambridge University Press).

In this piece, Laitin uses the comparative method to find the cause for political violence (or the absence thereof) in the Spanish Basque territory, Georgia and the Ukraine. Basque country in Spain is not a poverty stricken area at all. It is, in fact, one of the richer regions of Spain, and yet it saw the rise of ETA, a group that used terrorism for political purposes for decades. This gives us reason to question the notion that poverty itself drives political violence. Yet, other areas of Spain that have also seen political separatism, like Catalonia, did not experience violence to the same extent, but based the separatism on negotation instead. Why?

Two conditions are necessary, Laitin argues. First, there must be a social group, stratum, in which violence is an accepted part of socio-cultural practices. This gives us reason to put some stock into the notion that poverty is a factor, insofar as violence is more commonplace as a way of life in poverty stricken areas, even though it is not poverty in and of itself that is the cause. Secondly, the most likely recruits are those who are predominantly young people and members of local social groups, who rely greatly on norms of honour. The dense rural social structure of Basque territory thus became fertile ground for recruitment.

When a sufficient amount of honour is percieved to have been lost by the members of this group, for whom violence is an accepted social practice, political violence becomes a viable alternative.

This can explain why violent separatism developed in Basque territory and Georgia, but not in the Ukraine, where social network structures had a different character. Going beyond Laitin's study, it also explains why white power groups and extreme left wing groups turn to violence: in both environments, violence is seen as an acceptable political method, and both tend to develop sectarian social structures. Though left wing groups might not discuss their status in terms of loss of "honour", their political marginalization might have the same psycho-sociological effect.

Laitin's study was conducted before 9/11 and he did not address political Islam at all. Still, it could help us understand this phenomenon as well: the root cause should not be sought in the religion writ large, but rather in the types of social networks who create their own interpretations of this, have strong internal bonds of loyalty, weak feelings of loyalty or attachment towards the surrounding society and mobilize themselves around a perception of lost honour or dignity.

If this theory is correct, then an important task for politicians and other social actors is to think about the situation for social capital in areas characterized by strong social exclusion. Is the social capital low or high? Is the social capital primarily bridging - fostering networks between different communities - or bonding - fostering strong loyalty bonds within the group? In areas of low social capital - having weak capacity to mobilize - and when the social capital that does exist is primarily of the bonding kind, it would seem to me that at least one of the preconditions for the rise of political violence is fulfilled.