Lying in the shadow of the nation’s capital, Northern Virginia has not been immune to the problems of immigrant youth violence plaguing other areas of the country. Rivalries between the Salvadorian Mara Salvatrucha gang (MS, Mara, or MS-13 for short) and its opponents, for example, are responsible for some of the most heinous crimes. MS-13 murdered a 14-year-old boy, for instance, while he was sitting on a friend’s front porch wearing the “wrong” color shirt in 2005. Machete attacks and a laundry list of other crimes routinely land MS-13 gangsters in jail. And yet when “homegrown terrorism” is discussed on the nightly news and in the halls of government, few parallels are ever drawn between the growing body of social research on domestic gang activity and the radicalization theories addressing foreign terrorism networks like the one Osama bin Laden once commanded.
There is a tendency in America to avoid vilifying immigrant communities by portraying them as being prone to gang or terrorist activity. Anti-violence policies, however, could better utilize existing social and psychological research to explore why certain individuals adopt violent belief systems. Certain stresses associated with immigrant youth deviance are manifest in specific types of violent behavior, oftentimes offering a more compelling explanation for homegrown terrorism than other theories based on radicalization indicators that fail to identify specific pathways and common denominators. The problem with existing radicalization theories is that they take certain behavioral routes for granted without asking how or why an individual becomes susceptible to them in the first place.
The Social Disintegration Theory (SDT) proposed by Wilhelm Heitmeyer and Reimund Anhut offers one explanation for how an adolescent immigrant might fail to integrate into social, institutional, or socio-economic structures, leading to a path of violent divorce (be it political, religious, or otherwise) from the values of his or her parents. In this same general area of research, Timothy Brezina concludes that young immigrants sometime seek autonomy by engaging in violence through a process of recognition denial that has three components. Positional recognition denial is exhibited when the individual attempts to avoid the feelings of inferiority that erode self-esteem. Moral recognition denial is an attempt to restore either societal norms or those norms that the slighted individual believes ought to be upheld. Emotional recognition denial is when the lack of an alternative learning process becomes evident. The individual has little to no self-esteem and no emotional coping mechanisms to deal with stresses. The individual, particularly the male, rebels against society’s rules and seeks greater independence from family or community. This search for autonomy can lead to violence. It seems a plausible explanation for the followers of the late Yemeni cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, as well as for members of certain South Korean gangs.
In the field of strategic studies and terrorism research, SDT and social identity theories could be utilized to shed light on the motivations for joining global jihad. Social identity theory is useful in defining how an individual’s self-perception is tied to a sense of belonging to a particular social group. When young people feel that their status in the community is under threat, they can experience the impulse to protect it through violence. This has been evident among newer immigrants to America who feel disgruntled by their sense of marginalization and the moral ambiguity it creates in their understanding of government policy. Feeling marginalized, for example, they may ask themselves “Why is America preaching tolerance at home while killing civilians in Afghanistan?” It is possible for such moral ambiguity to serve as a psychological justification for violent behavior and even acts of terrorism.
Underlying all this theorizing about terrorism is a need to recognize the role of basic human nature. Terrorists, like those they attack, are oftentimes impelled instinctively to protect themselves and the communities with which they identify. According to Langdon Gilkey, evil “is both objective, resident in the cultural and institutional patterns of bias that we inherit, and subjective, internal, latent in the inordinate self-love running through every social group and through every social institution.” We are born, one might say, with a capacity for evil, but we try to deny it by projecting it onto others and invoking claims of self-defense or moral superiority. In certain circumstances, our basic impulses, whether unconscious or programmed into our genes, might prompt—though not dictate—our behavior. We as instinctual beings might attack a neighbor in Rwanda, slaughter a Croatian, or follow a Hitler. In seeking to understand the homegrown terrorist, we must therefore examine such behavior as the product of an impulse to reject marginalization and to prevent the disintegration of societal values to which an individual subscribes. The label “homegrown terrorist” may carry a certain sensational appeal for the evening news, but it seems more useful and prescriptive to ask more basic questions of how and why a person turns to extremism in the first place.
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A New Way to View Homegrown Terrorism
December 11, 2012
Lying in the shadow of the nation’s capital, Northern Virginia has not been immune to the problems of immigrant youth violence plaguing other areas of the country. Rivalries between the Salvadorian Mara Salvatrucha gang (MS, Mara, or MS-13 for short) and its opponents, for example, are responsible for some of the most heinous crimes. MS-13 murdered a 14-year-old boy, for instance, while he was sitting on a friend’s front porch wearing the “wrong” color shirt in 2005. Machete attacks and a laundry list of other crimes routinely land MS-13 gangsters in jail. And yet when “homegrown terrorism” is discussed on the nightly news and in the halls of government, few parallels are ever drawn between the growing body of social research on domestic gang activity and the radicalization theories addressing foreign terrorism networks like the one Osama bin Laden once commanded.
There is a tendency in America to avoid vilifying immigrant communities by portraying them as being prone to gang or terrorist activity. Anti-violence policies, however, could better utilize existing social and psychological research to explore why certain individuals adopt violent belief systems. Certain stresses associated with immigrant youth deviance are manifest in specific types of violent behavior, oftentimes offering a more compelling explanation for homegrown terrorism than other theories based on radicalization indicators that fail to identify specific pathways and common denominators. The problem with existing radicalization theories is that they take certain behavioral routes for granted without asking how or why an individual becomes susceptible to them in the first place.
The Social Disintegration Theory (SDT) proposed by Wilhelm Heitmeyer and Reimund Anhut offers one explanation for how an adolescent immigrant might fail to integrate into social, institutional, or socio-economic structures, leading to a path of violent divorce (be it political, religious, or otherwise) from the values of his or her parents. In this same general area of research, Timothy Brezina concludes that young immigrants sometime seek autonomy by engaging in violence through a process of recognition denial that has three components. Positional recognition denial is exhibited when the individual attempts to avoid the feelings of inferiority that erode self-esteem. Moral recognition denial is an attempt to restore either societal norms or those norms that the slighted individual believes ought to be upheld. Emotional recognition denial is when the lack of an alternative learning process becomes evident. The individual has little to no self-esteem and no emotional coping mechanisms to deal with stresses. The individual, particularly the male, rebels against society’s rules and seeks greater independence from family or community. This search for autonomy can lead to violence. It seems a plausible explanation for the followers of the late Yemeni cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, as well as for members of certain South Korean gangs.
In the field of strategic studies and terrorism research, SDT and social identity theories could be utilized to shed light on the motivations for joining global jihad. Social identity theory is useful in defining how an individual’s self-perception is tied to a sense of belonging to a particular social group. When young people feel that their status in the community is under threat, they can experience the impulse to protect it through violence. This has been evident among newer immigrants to America who feel disgruntled by their sense of marginalization and the moral ambiguity it creates in their understanding of government policy. Feeling marginalized, for example, they may ask themselves “Why is America preaching tolerance at home while killing civilians in Afghanistan?” It is possible for such moral ambiguity to serve as a psychological justification for violent behavior and even acts of terrorism.
Underlying all this theorizing about terrorism is a need to recognize the role of basic human nature. Terrorists, like those they attack, are oftentimes impelled instinctively to protect themselves and the communities with which they identify. According to Langdon Gilkey, evil “is both objective, resident in the cultural and institutional patterns of bias that we inherit, and subjective, internal, latent in the inordinate self-love running through every social group and through every social institution.” We are born, one might say, with a capacity for evil, but we try to deny it by projecting it onto others and invoking claims of self-defense or moral superiority. In certain circumstances, our basic impulses, whether unconscious or programmed into our genes, might prompt—though not dictate—our behavior. We as instinctual beings might attack a neighbor in Rwanda, slaughter a Croatian, or follow a Hitler. In seeking to understand the homegrown terrorist, we must therefore examine such behavior as the product of an impulse to reject marginalization and to prevent the disintegration of societal values to which an individual subscribes. The label “homegrown terrorist” may carry a certain sensational appeal for the evening news, but it seems more useful and prescriptive to ask more basic questions of how and why a person turns to extremism in the first place.
