![\"Stern2\"](\"\/pardeeschool\/files\/2016\/11\/Stern2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nJessica Stern,<\/a> Research Professor at the <\/span>Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently the focus of a profile by\u00a0Bostonia<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>that focused on the motivation of violent extremists,\u00a0and the logic that leads people into being recruited by terrorist organizations and subsequently committing terrorist acts.<\/span><\/p>\n The profile, entitled “Why Terrorists Kill<\/a>,”\u00a0was published in\u00a0<\/em>the Winter\/Spring issue of\u00a0Bostonia.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n <\/em>From the text of the article:<\/p>\n I<\/span>n a room inside a maximum security prison in The Hague, Jessica Stern, a small woman in a conservative black pantsuit, was seated across a wooden table from Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107, the Bosnian Serb warlord convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was found guilty of genocide for the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. At 70, Karad\u017ei\u0107 was still an imposing man, 6-foot-4, barrel-chested, with his trademark mane of white hair intact.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Stern is a research professor at BU\u2019s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and one of the world\u2019s leading scholars of terrorism and other forms of violent extremism. The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, in The Hague\u2014the court that had sentenced Karad\u017ei\u0107 to 40 years in prison\u2014granted her permission to interview the former Serb leader for a book she is writing examining the history behind his role in the Balkan war.<\/p>\n Karad\u017ei\u0107 is a psychiatrist, a poet, and a devout Orthodox Christian. He is also a liar and a charismatic master manipulator. During his 13 years as a fugitive war criminal in Belgrade, he had transformed himself into a New Age guru. Now, in the interview room where he had been holding forth on the glorious Serb past, Karad\u017ei\u0107 abruptly announced that he wanted to show her how he\u2019d worked as an energy healer.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n You can read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Stern\u2019s main focus is on perpetrators of violence and the possible connections between trauma and terror.\u00a0 She has written on terrorist groups across religions and ideologies, among them neo-Nazis, Islamists, anarchists, and white supremacists.\u00a0 She has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorists. <\/span>Learn more about her here.<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Prof. Jessica Stern discusses the motivation of violent extremists, and the logic that leads people into being recruited by terrorist organizations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11588,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8410],"tags":[9860,10055,8583,8859,9059,1171],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27333"}],"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\/11588"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27334,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27333\/revisions\/27334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n