Stern in BU Today on the Psychology of Terrorism

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Prof. Jessica Stern working on research with her students. Photo: BU Today.

Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed on the psychology behind terrorism, and the logic that leads people into being recruited by terrorist organizations and subsequently committing terrorist acts.

Stern was interviewed as part of a series by BU Todayentitled “Explaining Violence,” which looks at the work of BU researchers and medical experts who study and treat the causes and consequences of violence. Considered together, the four stories in the series. depict a vicious cycle of hurt, frustration, and vengeance that reverberates through every aspect of American life.

The installment featuring Stern, entitled “Lessons From Terrorists,” was published on November 14, 2016.

From the article:

As it turned out, Stern found that she could empathize with her subjects so deeply that she could suspend all judgment, focusing instead on the mistaken logic that leads to their becoming terrorists. Empathy is not the same as sympathy, she notes, and she neither condones nor excuses the acts of the terrorists she has encountered.

“I try to think like a terrorist recruiter,” she says. “What does it take to get someone to join my group if they’re in a war zone? If they see that the president in Iraq is favoring Shiites, and Sunnis feel unsafe and aren’t getting what they were promised, and they were at the top of Iraqi society for decades and suddenly they’re at the bottom, well, that’s a lot easier job for me than to recruit a terrorist in, say, Massachusetts.” For someone in the West, who is not living in a war zone, she says, “the pain is more personal. Psychology is more important the farther away we are from a war zone.” It’s important, Stern says, to distinguish the terrorism of war zones from the acts of terrorism committed in the United States and European countries.

She began talking about humiliation as a risk factor for terrorism after she returned from her first meetings with jihadist leaders in Pakistan, in the late 1990s. There, a Kashmiri militant told her he had founded his group because “Muslims have been overpowered by the West. Our ego hurts…we are not able to live up to our own standards for ourselves.”

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.