State, Society and National Security: Challenges and Opportunities in the 21st Century by Shashi Jayakumar

Author:Shashi Jayakumar [Jayakumar, Shashi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9789813109988
Google: Nre0jwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 29535312
Publisher: World Scientific
Published: 2016-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

Group explanations

Half a century ago, Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram conducted classical experiments on conformity26 and obedience to authority27 respectively, showing how people easily fell under the influence of a small group and were even willing to kill subjects when urged to do so by scientific authority. Philip Zimbardo showed the power of roles in transforming randomly chosen young men into sadistic prison guards or emotionally broken prisoners.28 These experiments show the power of situations to dramatically affect behaviour without actors even being aware of the subtle experimental manipulations of their environment.29 Building on these findings, Borum30 and Moghaddam31 each tried to synthesise relevant psychological literature into very different linear mechanisms of radicalisation. But these plausible theories suffer from a lack of empirical support.32

McCauley and Moskalenko33 proposed an intriguing set of five individual and four group mechanisms in a context of “jujitsu politics”, which constitute this process of radicalisation. The five individual mechanisms — personal grievance, slippery slope, love, risk and status, and unfreezing — are normal psychological processes. What they call unfreezing is simply changing one’s mind — unfreezing one’s old ideas, developing new ideas and refreezing these new ideas. In a sense, unfreezing is similar to Wiktorowicz’s cognitive opening, without the drama for this change of mind. The four group processes — group grievance, polarisation, competition and isolation — are also fairly normal. The notion of “jujitsu politics”, that the terrorists are in an escalating competition with the state is an important insight upon which they unfortunately do not elaborate. The weakness of their argument is that their various mechanisms are ad hoc, based on anecdotal and selective confirmatory evidence.34 Furthermore, McCauley and Moskalenko are careful to state that none of their mechanisms either alone or in combination is either necessary or sufficient to bring about violence.35 In other words, they do not know how significant or even relevant each of their mechanisms is. Since they are ubiquitous psychological mechanisms, their detection may not mean anything for radicalisation. Nor do we know how prevalent the mechanisms are in the process of turning violent. Indeed, this process may very well occur without any of their identified mechanisms. This severely limits the usefulness of their list.

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