BU Today Interviews Jessica Stern
Dr. Jessica Stern, who recently joined the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston Univeristy as a Research Professor, was interviewed by BU Today on February 2, 2016, on “how ISIS works and what we can do to stop it. The BU Today interview begins by pointing out that in the 1997 thriller The Peacemaker the Nicole Kidman character was based on Stern, and that she is one of the country’s leading experts on terrorism.
In 1999, she predicted a world where murderers would commit “macroterrorism,” or attacks aimed at achieving previously unimaginable casualty levels. That prophecy came true two years later on September 11, prompting Time to put her on its list of 100 innovators with bold ideas.
Stern is best known for her research sit-downs with murderers: she interviews terrorists in prisons and refugee camps, seeking to understand their motives. Her most recent book deals with terrorism’s public enemy number one: ISIS: The State of Terror (HarperCollins, 2015). Her research for the book serves as the backbone of a course she’s teaching at Pardee this semester, Guerilla Warfare and Terrorism.
Asked about her move to the Pardee School (from Harvard Univeristy), she says, “There are so many reasons why I wanted to come to the Pardee School. I am excited about being surrounded by an interdisciplinary group of faculty, all of whom work on global affairs, and from whom I hope to learn a lot. I also anticipate learning a lot from the Pardee students, who come from all over the world. I am also excited to be part of building a new school. I like the energy of Pardee. The students are clearly very excited, and the faculty is very welcoming.”
Most of the interview is on ISIS as a phenomenon and a security policy challenge for the United States. Asked “how do we defeat ISIS?” Jessica Stern says:
Both military force and containment are needed.
There are compelling reasons to expand the number of ground forces in Iraq, but it would be better if those forces were made up not of “crusaders,” but of Sunni Arabs. We already tried our hand at imposing a viable democracy on Iraq, an experiment that failed. And the situation in Syria is even more fraught. Defeating the “caliphate” will require ending the civil war in Syria, and for our troops to remain in the region until Sunni safety is assured.
Making Muslims feel unsafe in the West enhances ISIS’s recruitment drive. The vast majority of ISIS’s victims are Muslims. Proposals to implement Nuremburg-type laws for Muslims, requiring them to register with the state—and calls to ban Muslims from entering the United States—further ISIS’s goal of eliminating moderate Islam, to persuade Muslims living in the West to join ISIS’s cadres.
Countering ISIS’s propaganda efforts is essential. Serious containment will require input from business leaders, attorneys, philanthropists, and the government, just as was the case for political-warfare operations against the Soviet Union. Universities have a role to play as well. Next fall, I will be offering a course called P2P: Challenging Extremism, under the auspices of EdVentures Partners, the State Department, and Facebook. The course provides a pathway for university students in 30 countries (so far) to develop their own counternarratives and digital responses to ISIS’s and other terrorist groups’ propaganda.
We also need an army of volunteers able to speak, credibly and persuasively and one-on-one, with youth who are attracted to “jihad-chic,” long before they are drawn to violate the law. To this end, we should be deploying former terrorists—individuals who have abandoned jihadist organizations and can provide a more accurate picture of the jihadist way of life. They are uniquely equipped to explain that counter to ISIS’s propaganda, there is nothing heroic about ISIS.
The full interview can be read here.