{"id":20985,"date":"2016-02-02T02:14:39","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T07:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/?p=20985"},"modified":"2021-02-03T17:50:06","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T22:50:06","slug":"bu-today-interviews-jessica-stern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/2016\/02\/02\/bu-today-interviews-jessica-stern\/","title":{"rendered":"BU Today<\/i> Interviews Jessica Stern"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"BU<\/a>
BU Today interviews Dr. Jessica Stern who recently joined the Boston University Pardee School as a Research Professor.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dr. Jessica Stern<\/a>, who recently joined the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston Univeristy as a Research Professor, was interviewed by BU Today<\/a><\/em> on February 2, 2016, on “how ISIS works and what we can do to stop it. The\u00a0BU Today<\/a><\/em>\u00a0interview begins by pointing out that in the 1997 thriller\u00a0<\/span>The Peacemaker <\/em>the\u00a0<\/span>Nicole Kidman character was based\u00a0on Stern<\/a>, and that she is one of the country’s leading experts on terrorism.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1999, she predicted a world where murderers would commit \u201cmacroterrorism,\u201d or attacks aimed at achieving previously unimaginable casualty levels. That prophecy came true two years later on September 11, prompting\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/em>to put her on its list of\u00a0100 innovators with bold ideas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s public enemy number one:\u00a0ISIS: The State of Terror<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(HarperCollins, 2015). Her research for the book serves as the backbone of a course she\u2019s teaching at Pardee this semester,\u00a0Guerilla Warfare and Terrorism<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0I 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.\u00a0The students are clearly very excited, and the faculty is very welcoming.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of the interview<\/a> is on ISIS as a phenomenon and a security policy challenge for the United States. Asked “how do we defeat ISIS?” Jessica Stern\u00a0says:<\/p>\n

Both military force and containment are needed.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccrusaders,\u201d but of Sunni Arabs. We already tried our hand at imposing a viable democracy on Iraq, an experiment that failed.\u00a0And the situation in Syria is even more fraught.\u00a0Defeating the \u201ccaliphate\u201d will require ending the civil war in Syria, and for our troops\u00a0to remain in the region until Sunni safety is assured.<\/p>\n

Making Muslims feel unsafe in the West enhances ISIS\u2019s recruitment drive.\u00a0The vast majority of ISIS\u2019s victims are Muslims. Proposals to implement Nuremburg-type laws for Muslims, requiring them to register with the state\u2014and calls to ban Muslims from entering the United States\u2014further ISIS\u2019s goal of\u00a0eliminating moderate Islam, to persuade Muslims living in the West to join ISIS\u2019s cadres.<\/p>\n

Countering ISIS\u2019s propaganda efforts is essential.\u00a0Serious 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.\u00a0Universities have a role to play as well.\u00a0Next fall, I will be offering a course called P2P: Challenging Extremism, under the auspices of EdVentures Partners, the State Department, and Facebook.\u00a0The course provides a pathway for university students in 30 countries (so far) to develop their own counternarratives and digital responses to ISIS\u2019s and other terrorist groups\u2019 propaganda.<\/p>\n

We also need an army of volunteers able to speak, credibly and persuasively and one-on-one, with youth who are attracted to \u201cjihad-chic,\u201d long before they are drawn to violate the law.\u00a0To this end, we should be deploying former terrorists\u2014individuals who have abandoned jihadist organizations and can provide a more accurate picture of the jihadist way of life.\u00a0They are uniquely equipped to explain that counter to ISIS\u2019s propaganda, there is nothing heroic about ISIS.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The full interview can be read here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BU Today interviews Prof. Jessica Stern on how ISIS works and what we can do to stop it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1562,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8410,8432],"tags":[9287,9099,8625,9059,1171],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20985"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1562"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20985"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20990,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20985\/revisions\/20990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}