Stern in New Republic on Ex-Jihadi
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed for an article that tells the story of Jesse Morton, an American ex-jihadi struggling to rebuild his life in the country he’d once vowed to destroy.
Stern was quoted in the New Republic article entitled “Only Human.” From the text of the article:
By the time they met, however, cracks had started to show in Jesse’s veneer. On a trip to Boston that fall, he spoke to hundreds of people at a Department of Justice conference. After his talk, he broke down crying. That same week, he spoke to a Boston University class and broke down again when he described his rough childhood. The professor, Jessica Stern, is a leading expert on the psychology of extremism, and she thought he needed trauma treatment. She warned his new employers that Jesse seemed to be spiraling. She tried to connect him with a leading therapist. “This is a guy who has the potential to really have an impact on young people who might be attracted to jihadism,” Stern thought, “but only if he gets help.” He didn’t.
Everyone I spoke with in the CVE movement still believes Jesse has important contributions to make—if he can get out of his own way. Lorenzo Vidino, his former boss at the Program on Extremism at GWU, stands firmly by the decision to hire Jesse. “This is somebody who has invaluable insights into the radicalization process and great ideas about how to counter it,” Vidino says. But when I asked Jessica Stern, who’d been one of Jesse’s steadiest and most vocal champions, whether she trusts him, she took a long pause. “No,” she finally said. “Not completely.” She didn’t question that he was, in fact, a reformed extremist. “But do I think he’s a reliable person at this point? No. Do I think he’s going to go out and be a terrorist and kill a lot of people tomorrow? No.”
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.