Stern in The Hill: Fighting ISIS Recruitment
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said the government must be doing more to combat online recruitment of young people by ISIS.
Stern made the argument in a February 10, 2016 article in The Hill entitled “Senate Panel Approves Three Bills to Fight ISIS Online Recruitment.”
Jessica Stern, a research professor at the Boston University Pardee School for Global Studies, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee last month that the government must boost its efforts to develop its own online narratives for the same people ISIS is trying to recruit.
“One of the major gaps in our response to ISIS is the lack of investment in developing and disseminating effective counternarratives that are compelling to the millennial youth who are ISIS’s principal targets for recruitment,” she said.
“To do this effectively, we need to listen closely to what ISIS says it wants to achieve and to what it claims to offer youth.”
You can read the entire article here.
Jessica 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. She has been working with a team at Boston Children’s Hospital on the risk factors for violence among Somali-refugee youth. She is currently working on a study of Radovan Karadzic, indicted for war crimes in Bosnia. You can learn more about her here.