Want to fight radicalization? Start by changing your language, says scholar

Chris Bosley, a senior program officer for countering violent extremism at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), believes the key to reconciling communities torn apart by conflict and halting further radicalization is linguistic. 

In an interview this week, Bosley told Rudaw’s Roj Eli Zalla that ‘rehumanizing’ supporters of the Islamic State group (ISIS) is an important step on the road to reconciliation and allowing radicalized individuals to be reintegrated into society.

Bosley says this is especially important in cases where ISIS supporters cannot be prosecuted and punished owing to a lack of evidence or in cases of women and children taken to ISIS territory against their will. 

Delving into the complex causes of radicalizing, Bosley discusses how the seeds of further radicalization can be prevented from growing into fresh conflict by encouraging social belonging and opening a dialogue. 

Although he freely admits the process will take time and will be difficult to swallow for communities persecuted by ISIS, failing to do so could create much more dangerous conditions in future. 

Rudaw: You write that to defeat ISIS, or to truly defeat ISIS, we need to describe them as people, or the returnees as people. Why is this imperative? 

  Unfortunately the language we are using to describe disengaging from violent extremism now is really instilling fear and it’s instilling anger and it’s keeping those spaces closed. 

Chris Bosley: People are returning to their homes having lived or having fought with ISIS. It is imperative to work with the individuals themselves, to work on rehabilitating individuals so that they reject violence as a way of life, reject violence as a means to resolve conflict or to pursue a goal. But in addition to that it’s also really important to work with the communities that they’re returning to, to prepare the communities with developing justice and reconciliation mechanisms to provide closure for communities that may have been affected, to provide obviously the capacity for rehabilitation for the people returning, and in some cases maybe even for social and structural reforms in cases where political and social and structural issues maybe gave rise to violent extremism. But in all of these cases it’s really important to make sure that the communities are able to have an open space for the people returning to engage with them in a positive, inclusive, and sustained way between the returning person themselves and community members and community institutions. This way you can build bonds, you can rebuild a sense of belonging between the people returning and the community, you can offer a new sense of identity to the people returning. Unfortunately the language we are using to describe disengaging from violent extremism now is really instilling fear and it’s instilling anger and it’s keeping those spaces closed, it’s reinforcing the very identities that we’re trying to help people to shed and it’s buttressing the social divisions that may have given rise to violent radicalization in the first place. 

It’s not just to open up the space for rehabilitation of those who are returning, but the terms we are using – ex-terrorists, jihadists – that instills fear at home or in communities? If I am hearing this word over and over, it has a negative impact on me as opposed to describing them some other way?

We know cognitively that the words you use and the language you use actually has a cognitive effect, sometimes it’s unconscious on the way that people perceive issues and the way people approach issues. For example there have been studies that show that when you refer to crime as a beast people tend to gravitate toward more law enforcement, hardline responses, whereas if you use the same information and refer to crime as a virus, people tend to gravitate toward more social reforms as a response. There have been disciplines who have taken advantage of this. You look at public health, you look at social workers, have used language in order to encourage help-seeking behaviour among highly stigmatized populations, people who live with HIV, people who have mental health conditions, people who have disabilities. In criminal justice, another example, we know that if the labels for someone returning to the community after a period of incarceration, if you label them and you refer to them as reformed, that in and of itself will reduce the chances of recidivism as opposed to if you label that person a criminal. 

Some of these guys have been implicated in really horrendous crimes. Does this change of language that you’re calling for, the description of the returnees, is there a distinction between those who have actually committed crimes and those who were lured into the group? 

Justice is obviously a really, really important piece of the response to people as they return from ISIS. We can’t forget that ISIS was at the end of the day a genocidal organization. It targeted communities, it targeted entire ethnicities, it targeted civilians. So justice is going to be really important. But unfortunately justice, the response to people returning can’t be wished away and confined to the criminal justice sector. Prosecution in some cases is going to be impossible and in some cases it’s not going to be preferred. For example, it’s in many cases going to be really difficult to gather evidence from a foreign battlefield. In other cases there may be places where just the sheer number of people returning are going to overwhelm the justice system. When you’re talking about children for example – obviously children are victims, they were trafficked into the conflict zone or born in the conflict zone through no fault of their own. Women are obviously more complex. Many women went over there of their own agency and are avid supporters of ISIS. But some were forced or coerced to travel to live with ISIS and in most cases for women it’s going to be a more complex combination where victim and perpetrator coexist in the same person. The justice systems are going to have a really hard time dealing with that. So when justice doesn’t look like the inside of a prison, what does justice look like? It’s going to be important for communities to figure out – what are the reconciliation mechanisms, what are the restorative justice mechanisms to allow the communities and their returning persons to move forward together.

Is there an assumption that radicalization is more of a neurological or psychological issue, or in other words, are you dismissing the political aspect of it? 

No, we’re not. Radicalization and the violent radicalization process is extremely complex. It occurs at the intersection of structural, of social, of cognitive factors. But we know neurologically that when a person feels isolated, alienated, or marginalized, that so-called sacred values by which someone is willing to fight or die for become more salient. And when those sacred values are not shared by a broader society or are not perceived to be shared by a broader society then a person could feel like his own identity or her own identity is being attacked by that society. We also know from neurological studies that when somebody feels like their identity is under attack, the very same cognitive reactions are activated as if their physical security was under attack. So neurological inhibitions to deploying violence are removed. Now does that leave room for political or social drivers for radicalization? Absolutely. How does somebody feel isolated? How does somebody feel marginalized? That is in often cases due to political or social reasons. So absolutely we do not mean to dismiss by any means the political causes for radicalization. We are merely couching it within a broader circumstance. 

Would ‘rehumanizing’ ISIS fighters elicit the same feeling among the victims?

Nobody wants to live next door to a terrorist, right? I certainly don’t. That’s an understandable reaction. But it’s also important to engage with these communities and help them to understand the circumstances that we’re dealing with and the challenges that are being dealt with. Because the alternative is going to be much worse and much more dangerous. The ad hoc communities, the displacement camps, the refugee camps where people are living now, they’re not designed to provide justice, they’re not designed to monitor for radicalization, they’re not designed to rehabilitate or provide rehabilitation services. So the fear is that by not allowing them back into communities if justice in a traditional sense is not an option in many cases, leaving them in refugee camps where they are now, those camps may very well become incubators for a much greater threat down the line. In 1994 for example when Saudi Arabia stripped citizenship from Osama bin Laden – Osama bin Laden wasn’t able to return to his home community, so he found a more permissive environment, and the rest is history. So yes it is difficult, there’s no question it’s difficult, but that’s why language is so important so that people can rehumanize – both the people returning and the people returning can rehumanize the society and in that way dialogue and reconciliation can begin to happen, social learning can begin to happen. It will be a long process. It will be a process where there need to be mechanisms in place but those mechanisms will have to be contingent on the context of the local community. 

So it’s a two way street?

That’s right. Rehumanization, social belonging, that is inherently a two-way street. And there are programs that focus on rehabilitating the individual and that is important because it is a two-way street, but you cannot just only solely focus on the individual. We are not by any means saying that the individual should not be a focus of the rehabilitation programs – of course they should. But in addition to addressing those individual cognitive issues it is also absolutely vital to address the social and structural issues that are at play. 

Are you concerned about the foreign fighters held in makeshift camps in northeast Syria? 

Absolutely. We’re talking about an enormous number of people. Something like 50,000 people from 120 different countries traveled to join, live, or fight with ISIS. Many of them have been killed. But even in Al-Hol camp alone you have between 9 and 12,000 foreigners who are living there who are stuck there in limbo with nowhere to go. So of course leaving them there in limbo is not an option. There needs to be mechanisms put in place, diplomatic mechanisms by which people can return back to their home communities, and part of that is dealing with language so that the communities don’t put as much political pressure on their politicians to keep them there. People are violently radicalized in the context of their own societies and it is the responsibility of those societies to take those people back and to rehabilitate them and care of their problem.