Stern in The Guardian on U.S. ISIS Convert
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed for an article on Abdullahi Yusuf, a Muslim teen who found his way into extremism but is now being integrated back into society through a unique “ideological rehab” program.
Stern was interviewed for a January 4, 2018 article in The Guardian entitled “‘An Incredible Transformation’: How Rehab, Not Prison, Worked For a US Isis Convert.”
From the text of the article:
But there is no reliable research analyzing the outcomes, said Jessica Stern, a professor at Boston University, specializing in extremism, and the author of Isis: The State of Terror.
“The Saudis have reported very low recidivism but they have also had some significant failures and they’ve never made their data available for scrutiny. Also, they have strategies that are not going to be replicated elsewhere, such as finding the men a wife, buying them a car and getting them jobs,” she said.
Experts are watching Yusuf’s case with great interest, as it is understood to be the first of its kind in the US. “It’s an important experiment,” said Stern.
She pointed to a recent report citing statistics from the federal government’s National Counterterrorism Center that at the end of 2016 there were 300 terrorism offenders in US prisons, 90 of whom are due to be released in the next five years.
“At least some will probably reengage in terrorist activity … because they either remain radicalized or are susceptible to re-radicalization,” the center states.
Stern said there should be deradicalization programs in prison.
She has conducted research among the Somali-American community in Minnesota, where she found refugee families suffered disproportionate levels of economic hardship and discrimination.
Stern is the coauthor with J.M. Berger of ISIS: The State of Terror; and the author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror, selected by the Washington Post as a best book of the year; Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, selected by the New York Times as a notable book of the year; The Ultimate Terrorists; and numerous articles on terrorism. She has held fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Erik Erikson Institute, and the MacArthur Foundation. She was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, a National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a Fellow of the World Economic Forum. Stern taught as a Lecturer at Harvard University from 1999-2015. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, she worked in government, serving on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff and as an analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Stern has nearly completed her training as an Advanced Academic Candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis.