Jessica Stern in POV: What To Do About ISIS
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, gave a thorough rundown on the history of the complex and terrifying ISIS, as well as a prescription for the future as the world comes to grips with its menace.
Stern wrote an article entitled “Here’s What We Should Do About ISIL” on Nov. 20 in BU Today’s POV Series, an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international.
From the text of the article:
With the Paris attacks, ISIL has taken this challenge to a whole new level. Until now, we have mostly seen relatively unsophisticated self-starters, inspired by ISIL’s ideology, but not directed by its leadership. But it was only a matter of time before ISIL would be able to coordinate attacks outside its territory. To do so requires not only trained labor and weaponry, but most important, intelligence and counterintelligence, the latter greatly enhanced by a Snowden-inspired antisurveillance mood. We are likely to see ISIL-trained operatives working together with local personnel who know the targeted city or facility.
Over time, we will likely see more use of insiders, as we may have seen in the explosion of the Russian airliner over Egypt on October 31.
You can read the entire article here.
Stern’s main focus is on perpetrators of violence and the possible connections between trauma and terror. She has written on terrorist groups across religions and ideologies, among them neo-Nazis, Islamists, anarchists, and white supremacists. She has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorists. Learn more about her here.