Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education by Diego Gambetta, Steffen Hertog
Tra i terroristi islamici la presenza di ingegneri (e scienziati applicati in generale) è curiosamente sovrabbondante.
Che farsene di questa informazione? Forse puo’ aiutarci a rispondere alla domanda: "chi è il terrorista islamico tipico? Come si diventa tali?”.
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Sul corso della storia recente la violenza di pochi estremisti (terrorismo) ha inciso molto...
... TO EVEN THE MOST CASUAL OBSERVER, KEY MOMENTS IN THE LAST TWO centuries demonstrate the disproportionate impact that the violent actions of a handful of extremists can have in shaping the course of events in the Western world...
L'attacco dell'11 settembre 2001 alle torri gemelle. L'assassinio dell'Arciduca Ferdinando in Serbia. Gli spartachisti il cui zelo rivoluzionario contribuì all'insorgere della destra tedesca nel 1919. La banda Baader-Meinhof, sempre in Germania. Le Brigate Rosse, Ordine Nuovo e Avanguardia Nazionale in Italia. Gli anarchici con i loro attentati alle corone a cavallo tra otto e novecento. Sendero Luminoso in Perù. Le FARC in Colombia. E poi ancora gli islamisti. Si potrebbe continuare all'infinito.
Spesso le conseguenze epocali di certi atti terroristici sono del tutto non intenzionali...
... Violent extremists may have abruptly changed the course of history, both nationally and internationally, but often not in the way they intended. The outcome of their actions depends more on the response of the establishment...
Ma chi diventa terrorista?...
... What kind of people embark on a violent, radical course when their chances of success are low and the fight they pick is so asymmetrical in terms of force?...
Rispondere è difficile: le narrazioni in campo sono distorte in quanto che loro stesse sono strumento di lotta e non di ricerca della verità...
... The powers under attack, too, strive to impose their narrative on events, and demonizing extremists is an inevitable part of that process...
La retorica ufficiale dell'establishment non può essere presa in considerazione.
La verità è la prima vittima di ogni conflitto. Bisogna allora ingegnarsi, per questo adotteremo un punto di partenza originale: la sovra-rappresentazione di una categoria vocazionale come quella degli ingegneri nelle formazioni terroristiche...
... In this book we take a different and unusual approach. Our point of departure is a surprising fact: engineers are overrepresented among violent Islamist extremists...
Vantaggi dell'approccio: è facile reperire notizie non ambigue sulla formazione dei terroristi...
... Relying on education as our key variable has several advantages. The level of education and, for those who attended university, the discipline of the degree pursued are types of biographic information that are not very difficult to obtain; because they are considered irrelevant for governments’ counterterrorism operations, they are unlikely to be classified or strategically manipulated...
E poi: la formazione si sceglie, l'occupazione meno...
... education usually does not change or progress after an individual has gone through the education system, while occupation does... they are at least to some extent the result of the subjects’ choice...
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La domanda tipica che si pongono gli studiosi: quali condizioni socio-economiche fomentano il terrorismo?
Le risposte più comuni...
... the failure of secular modernization projects, blocked social mobility, economic malaise, Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, the legacy of colonialism and cultural imperialism, and political alienation” (Wiktorowicz 2004b: 3)...
Nella lista manca la povertà. In realtà c'è chi l'ha invocata ma i riscontri sono a dir poco esigui...
... Poverty is often invoked... In fact, the opposite effect has also been detected: there is evidence of a positive correlation between level of education and militancy both among Islamist and left-wing radicals (Russell and Miller 1977; Krueger and Maleckova 2003; Krueger 2007; Berrebi 2007)...
In condizioni del genere, concentrarsi sulla figura dell’ingegnere può essere utile...
... Can we identify the socioeconomic conditions to which engineers are particularly exposed relative to other graduates that could explain their radicalization?...
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Secondo interrogativo: esiste una mentalità terrorista?...
... Do some people more than others have a mind-set susceptible to the lure of extremism?...
Per molti studiosi non esiste niente del genere, ma, visto quanto ci dice la psicologia, sarebbe proprio curioso se le cose stessero davvero così...
... The idea that, given the “right” socioeconomic conditions, anyone can end up an extremist is widespread among social scientists. We are wary of believing that there could be types of individuals whose hardwired traits make them more likely to become extremists...
E’ vero: la psicologia ci dice poco nello specifico...
... While we know that violent extremists are more likely to be male and young, no other feature has consistently emerged. No one has been able to construct a profile of the archetypal extremist...
Ma ci dice molto sulle correlazioni tra ideologia professata e personalità...
... an increasing amount of empirically grounded research in political psychology, which we review in chapter 6, shows that political preferences in general are grounded in personality types and even in genetic dispositions...
Ci dice molto anche sul legame tra personalità e scelte negli studi...
... There are theoretical grounds to suggest that certain political and ideological orientations can be either promoted by the discipline one chooses to study or be the reason why certain individuals are attracted to a discipline in the first place...
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Terza questione: quanto pesa la “domanda” di ingegneri nel loro successivo reclutamento?...
... To what extent is the question of who ends up becoming an extremist a matter of “supply”—different types of people choosing particular types of extremism—or a matter of “demand”—groups searching for and selecting suitable recruits?. ..
È chiaro che se all'organizzazione serve costruire una rete telematica o una bomba, la presenza di ingegneri nelle loro file sarebbe facilmente spiegata...
... This explanation of violent extremists as demand driven seems particularly suited to the case of engineers, who possess technical skills that make them prized recruits among all kinds of extremist groups...
Ma a quanto pare la sovra-rappresentazione ha radici ideologiche e non strumentali...
... Does ideology matter in determining which types of people join certain groups? The strategic recruitment hypothesis may not work if different types of people are attracted to different types of groups, in which case regardless of how groups select, groups would receive different types of people: “It is plausible but yet to be proven that different types of terrorism disproportionately attract individuals with specific temperaments...
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I terroristi non soffrono di patologie psicologiche...
... RESEARCHERS WHO HAVE LOOKED FOR PATHOLOGICAL TRAITS IN THE minds of violent extremists have found none, and generally uncovered little that distinguishes extremists from anyone else—“they are just like you and me!”... Kruglanski and Fishman 2006; Ruby 2002; Silke 1998...
Ciò che si riscontra è una tendenza degli ingegneri a simpatizzare con la destra politica. Chi ha una formazione umanistica guarda a sinistra...
... The systematic differences in the educational composition of different extremist groups we described in chapter 5 is a strong indication that different types of people are attracted to different types of extremism: engineers appear mostly on one side, and social scientists and humanities graduates appear mostly on the other side....
Da questo punto di vista islamismo e terrorismo di destra sono affini...
... Right-wing and Islamist extremism share many ideological features, while left-wing extremism differs from both... left-wing extremist groups... are joined by humanities and social sciences graduates who are conversely absent from Islamist and right-wing extremist groups...
Cos'ha in mano la psicologia contemporanea che può essere utile all'analisi? Due cose: 1) studi su ideologia & personalità e 2) studi su scelte professionali & personalità...
... The political psychology literature, which we examine shortly, offers extensive evidence of the traits associated with conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism. We also have solid evidence on the prevalence of certain personality traits among graduates of different disciplines...
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L'uomo di destra offre tre tratti caratteriali tipici: 1) facile al disgusto, 2) mentalmente chiuso (o focalizzato) e 3) leale con il gruppo di appartenenza...
... A thorough review of the literature, which focuses mostly on the personality traits underlying right-wing and conservative attitudes, reveals that three traits stand out as the most relevant: one trait, an emotional one, is the proneness to experience disgust; another trait, the most multifaceted of the three, involves a strong “need for cognitive closure”; the third, at once cognitive and emotional, is an urge to impose strict distinctions between in-group and out-group members...
Il “disgustato” è in cerca o rimpiange forme di purezza.
Esempio: posizioni sull'aborto...
... This characteristic appears to underlie conservatism in particular on social issues like abortion or gay rights, both of which relate to notions of morality or purity (Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom 2008; Inbar et al. 2009; Inbar et al. 2012; Jost and Amodio 2011).3 Nazis were particularly well-known for their rabid homophobia and obsession with cultural purity...
La tipica promiscuità della sinistra non fa per lui...
... Conversely, disgust is weak among those with leftist inclinations—perhaps explaining why post-World War II left-wing student activists in Europe and the United States tried to shock the conservative establishment with their use of feces in various protest events (including so-called “shit-ins”)...
Il caso di Faisal Shahzad...
... Faisal Shahzad, who planted a bomb in an SUV parked in Times Square in 2010, was very clean and diligent, and left his apartment in immaculate condition...
Il caso di Hosam Maher Husein Smadi...
... Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a young Jordanian national whom the FBI “lured [in 2009] into a plot to blow up the Fountain Place tower in downtown Dallas,” was described by his friends as “obsessively clean; three times a week, he removed the furniture from his bungalow and cleaned the floors.”...
Il caso di Mohamed Atta...
... Most striking of all is Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 attack mastermind, who wrote in a sort of will, “an almost hallucinatory document,” instructions on how to treat his body after death: “‘I do not want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral.’” He also asked “the men [who] would be washing his dead body to avoid unshielded contact with his genitals” (Holmes 2005: 138)...
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Sul bisogno di chiusura cognitiva: c'è come un'avversione per le ambiguità...
... It encompasses “intolerance of ambiguity,” a notion introduced in connection with authoritarianism by Else Frenkel-Brunswik, a psychologist who worked with Theodor Adorno on The Authoritarian Personality (1950)...
A destra sono più concentrati, a sinistra più curiosi...
... the profile of liberals and left-wingers is the very opposite: they are “more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking” and more likely to tolerate disorder, complexity, and rebellion (Carney et al. 2008: 807–8)...
A cosa si collega la chiusura cognitiva...
... ideological conservatism, right-wing voting, attempts to maintain group norms and traditions, racism, right-wing authoritarianism,9 and “social dominance orientation,” a measure of individuals’ preference for social hierarchy and domination over lower-status groups (Kemmelmeier 1997; Kruglanski and Orehek 2011; Roets and Van Hiel 2006; Van Hiel, Pandelaere and Duriez 2004)...
Interessante: la chiusura cognitiva si correla sia con il terrorismo che con l'avversione radicale al terrorismo...
... Kruglanski and Orehek (2011) show a correlation of high NFC and tough anti-terror positions, while Federico and colleagues (2005) link NFC to support for military action against Iraq...
Studiosi che hanno approfondito...
... Poland and Flanders... Kossowska and Van Hiel 2003... Chirumbolo, Areni, and Sensales 2004...
C'è poi il fattore lealtà: a destra e presso gli islamisti è più sentito, a sinistra predominano ideologie "universaliste".
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Come si distribuiscono i tre tratti caratteriali tra i diversi laureati?
La fonte: European Social Survey (ESS).
Anni considerati: 2002, 2004, 2006 e 2008.
Avversione ai gay: molto più marcata nelle facoltà scientifiche...
... Engineers stand out as those most opposed to gay freedom (figure 6.1); just under a quarter of them are opposed, while graduates in medicine, law, and economics hover around 20 percent (which is also the overall graduate average), and all other subjects, including humanities and social and psychological sciences, seem more tolerant, showing opposition at around 15 percent...
La chiusura mentale è misurabile indirettamente da cinque preferenze...
... five components of NFC: traditionalism (figure 6.2), tolerance of inequality (figure 6.3), preference for order and hierarchy (figure 6.4), threat perception (figure 6.5), and openness to new experiences (figure 6.6)...
Ebbene, praticamente in tutte e cinque le misurazioni gli ingegneri svettano...
... We find that engineers are not particularly traditional (figure 6.2). They are also somewhat in favor of creativity (figure 6.6), but this indicator is generally the least discriminating among academic disciplines. All other results are in the expected direction, showing graduates in engineering scoring at or near the top. While engineers are often “beaten” to the top position by graduates in economics, they are the most consistent, showing higher scores across all indicators...
Altri elementi che indicano la chiusura autoritaria tipica di chi nutre una vocazione verso le scienze applicate...
... engineers find it particularly likely that a terror attack will happen in the next twelve months, indicating a strong threat perception; display a strong preference for authoritarian schooling; and are economically to the right on questions about redistribution and welfare, albeit less so than economics graduates...
Ancora: l'atteggiamento ostile degli ingegneri verso l'immigrazione...
... Economics students and even more so law graduates are less rigid on immigration, while engineers seem eager to preserve the integrity of their national community (even if not in the name of “tradition”)...
Ma qui scatta l'obiezione: nel mondo islamico essere ingegneri è prestigioso. Non è che indirizzarsi verso questi studi riflette una scelta familiare più che una scelta personale?...
... One could suspect that our measures of psychological traits drawn from a European population may be relevant for understanding Western-born radicals but not graduates in Muslim countries. Muslims in the developing world might have different reasons for choosing their discipline of study; given strong family bonds and the high prestige of engineering programs, parental pressure, for example, might play a more important role than preferences... however, in Muslim countries medical studies are generally as prestigious (and time-consuming and costly) as engineering. High-achieving students hence should have a reasonably free choice between these two degrees...
Ma la risposta è negativa. Basta fare un confronto tra ingegneria e medicina: anche essere medico è prestigioso ma la presenza di medici nelle formazioni terroristiche non è comparabile...
... however, in Muslim countries medical studies are generally as prestigious (and time-consuming and costly) as engineering. High-achieving students hence should have a reasonably free choice between these two degrees...
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Un test alternativo: le donne, da un punto di vista psicologico, sembrano essere il contrario degli ingegneri, possiamo sfruttare questo fatto ai nostri fini...
... In addition to male graduates in the social sciences and humanities, there is another group that manifests an inverse distribution to that of the engineers: women...
L'esito del test conferma: la donna terrorista, quando c’è, si impegna con molta più frequenza a sinistra, e comunque poco nelle formazioni islamiche...
... we have been able to assemble for a number of groups show that the left-wing group with the lowest share of women still boasts a higher share than the highest shares of any right-wing or Islamist group...
E poi: andiamo a vedere cosa scelgono le donne all'università...
... everywhere in the world engineering is the most male-dominated discipline. Conversely, female representation among humanities and social sciences students is much stronger, in line with their stronger representation among leftist groups...
E il legame sesso/ideologia? Lo hanno studiato sistematicamente Weinberg e Eubank nel 2011. Le donne possono amare un “fascista” ma per contrapposizione: difficilmente si sentono tali...
... women have largely been missing from the ranks of neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, and violent racial supremacist groups. And, so far as we are aware, women have rarely participated in the “death squads” that were prevalent in Central and South America during the 1970s. These rightist groups typically stressed the traditional child-bearing role of women and emphasized the manliness and therapeutic benefits of violence...
Il legame sesso e ideologia è stato studiato da altri autori: Cunningham 2003; Eager 2008; Henshaw 2013...
... “being male increases the probability of an individual being an extreme right voter by more than 50 percent This finding supports results from existing national studies that found that right-wing extremist parties have consistently attracted a considerably higher number of male voters than female voters” (Arzheimer and Carter 2006: 428)...
Donne foreign fighter? Non pochissime, ma, anche qui, spesso conta l'amore: “ogni donna ama un fascista”...
... “Women and girls appear to make up about 10% of those leaving Europe, North America and Australia to link up with jihadi groups, including Islamic State.” Their motives, however, differ and seem less bellicose than those of men: “In most cases, women and girls appear to have left home to marry jihadis...
Una presenza trascurabile, comunque.
L'abisso che separa donne e ingegneri è confermato ovunque si guardi, e si riflette sia nella mentalità che nelle scelte vocazionali che nelle scelte ideologiche...
... On all other measures that we presented for male graduates, women do indeed score lower than men do and, a fortiori, much lower than engineers: they are less tolerant of inequality, have a weaker preference for order and hierarchy, are less opposed to gay freedom, and more tolerant of immigrants in all other respects...
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C'è poi un altro tratto tipico dei terroristi: la tendenza a semplificare...
... Political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab first attributed to right-wing extremists what they called simplism: the “unambiguous ascription of single causes and remedies for multifactored phenomena” (1971: 7)...
C'è in loro una certa ingenuità...
... It stands to reason that extremists of all stripes, not just right-wingers, in order to do what they do, need a considerable degree of cognitive naïveté concerning how the world works, especially about the causes of the state of affairs...
Nell'uomo di destra si è riscontrata un certo eccesso di fiducia...
... New evidence suggests that a feature arguably related to simplism, overconfidence in one’s beliefs, is indeed stronger on the right than on the left, and that Lipset and Raab’s conjecture might be correct...
Sull'ingenuità dei kamikaze...
... Is simplism present also among Islamist extremists? Psychologist Bernhard Fink and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers argue that “cognitive simplicity” is particularly powerful among religiously motivated suicide bombers (Fink and Trivers 2014; see also Triandis 2008)...
Un esempio classico...
... The assassins of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat believed that his regime would quickly crumble after his killing, allowing them to establish an Islamic state (Beattie 2000: 276)...
Ora: tra gli ingegneri più che altrove la tendenza a semplificare le questioni politiche è emersa in modo preponderante...
... Is simplism also a feature of engineers? For all their technical superiority engineers can be surprisingly naïve when it comes to political issues. U.S. research has shown that students in the pure sciences have more sophisticated and less closed views of knowledge than do students in engineering (understood as an “applied science”); those in soft, social scientific fields have the most open-ended view of knowledge as uncertain and dependent on their own reasoning ability (Paulsen and Wells 1998; Jehng, Johnson, and Anderson 1993)...
C'è chi viene istruito a chiedere e chi a rispondere. L'ingegnere è della seconda categoria...
... Scientists learn to ask questions, while engineering students, like followers of text-based religions, rely more strongly on answers that have already been given...
La mentalità dello scienziato applicato: ordine, gerarchia, autorità. “La scienza non è democratica!”...
... The ordered, hierarchical, and corporatist view of society—akin to a well-maintained machine—that we mentioned in chapter 4 could gel with the engineering mentality, seeking clear answers to closed-end problems...
L'arroganza della certezza scientifica...
... An extreme case illustrating the “arrogance of scientific certitude” is Bekkay Harrach, whom we met in chapter 1, a German Moroccan student of engineering who went to Afghanistan in 2007 to train for jihad, joined Al-Qaida, and died in a bombardment of the Bagram air base in 2010. He had released some videos that can still be viewed on YouTube:31 in one of them he presents, neatly written out on a blackboard, two simple mathematical formulas that produce curves that represent the fight between the West and Al-Qaida, aiming to “prove” that the latter will inevitably prevail...
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Chi studia le tendenze ideologiche all'università conferma: la destra fa il pieno tra gli ingegneri...
... To test these assumptions, we used ESS data on self-declared political preferences, measured on a 0 to 10 left to right scale recorded by the ESS, broken down by discipline. The distribution is reported in figure 6.8: in line with our expectations, economics, law, and engineering are more to the right than the average of the whole sample while social sciences and humanities graduates are more to the left...
Possibile conclusione...
... engineers are the least liberal, followed by faculty in business studies, while humanities and social science professors had the most leftist...
A riprova: donne a sinistra...
... Women in the ESS data, too, match the expectation and are more to the left by a small but significant margin (their score is 4.9 versus 5.1 for men...
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Domanda: il carattere è innato?
... are the traits innate, that is, do they make individuals both choose a particular discipline and gravitate toward a particular political behavior?...
Evidenza per le preferenze ereditate...
... There is, however, a growing body of literature, to which we referred at the onset of this chapter (see footnote 1), arguing for and offering some evidence that political attitudes could be inherited (Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2005; Verhulst, Eaves, and Hatemi 2012). There is also indirect evidence that individuals who already possess a given mind-set are attracted to specific disciplines. Ladd and Lipset, drawing on the large 1969 Carnegie survey, not only document the above-mentioned political biases among U.S. faculty and students; they also show that “un-socialized” students in the first four semesters of study already exhibit these biases (1975: 74–75). In their study, no other variable predicts ideological leanings as powerfully as discipline...
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Volendo tirare le somme: all'origine del terrorismo c'è quasi sempre una forma di frustrazione...
... The evidence we found is ample enough to revive the theory of relative deprivation and frustrated expectations as a fundamental explanation of why people form and join extremist movements...
Le attese deluse dei più dotati sono la variabile fondamentale...
... Engineers, and to a smaller extent doctors, stand out among them because when economic development ground to a halt in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they fell from the highest perch in terms of expectations and formed or joined Islamist movements that in previous decades had been led by lower-status graduates...
Attenzione: non parlo di frustrazioni materiali...
... The sources of frustrated expectations are not rooted in sheer materialism, however...
Piuttosto di frustrazioni legate allo status...
... The fuel flows rather from the feeling of being unjustly deprived of a status for which they and their families worked hard and sacrificed, and to which they felt entitled to aspire, and, grander still, from the lack of opportunity to prove one’s worth in shaping the future one’s country...
Implicazione: istruzione diffusa non significa pace. Anzi...
... Middle East regimes would discover that promoting higher education does not promote social acquiescence... The first generation of violent Islamist radicals in the 1970s was replete with highly educated individual... Signs of “proletarization” have been apparent in radical Islamist groups now for a while, as we noted in chapter 1. Still, these motives seem to take effect in a second stage, after groups have been formed and their goals and ideology have taken shape...
Ma per trasformarsi in terroristi islamici, oltre alle frustrazioni, occorre dell'altro: la giusta mentalità...
... Relative deprivation is not, however, an exhaustive explanation of engineers’ overrepresentation. Engineers continue to be vastly overrepresented among radical Islamists in both the West and South Asia despite not being exposed to the same relative deprivation as their peers in the Middle East...
La figura dell'ingegnere sintetizza al meglio i due requisiti.
Evidenza: ingegneri più violenti e più religiosi...
... we found evidence that engineers are more likely to join violent opposition groups than nonviolent ones, to prefer religious groups to secular groups, and to be less likely to defect once they join an Islamist group...
La cosa è vera ovunque…
... overrepresentation of engineers occurs in vastly different social and economic contexts...
Ipotesi rigettata: molta tecnologia, molti ingegneri...
... network connections by themselves do not explain the overrepresentation of engineers: this cannot be due to a hypothetical jihadi engineer-mutant who started the whole process, which then spread through his engineer-dominated network of friends and trusted contacts. Network connections also fail to explain why engineers are less likely, and social scientists and humanities students much more likely, to drop out of radical organizations...
Altra ipotesi rigettata: quella movimentista. Gli ingegneri prevalgono a parità di frustrazioni subite nelle élites...
... Next, the patterns of overrepresentation show the limits of social movement theories that, in order to explain the emergence of rebel movements, invoke “political opportunity structures” and “political entrepreneurs”... But the concepts of social movement theory cannot account for the uneven success of Islamist activism across different categories of people and, by implication, the influence that the membership of groups has on their militant strategies and persistence. As we argued in the preface, they cannot explain why among larger dissatisfied populations certain agents were the first to become radicalized...
Altra ipotesi scartata: gli ingegneri sono reclutati per le loro skills, non perché frustrati o in possesso della giusta mentalità...
... Another theory of extremists’ profile purports that it would be determined by recruiters’ choices, that it would be in other words demand driven...our evidence suggests that recruiters’ preferences do not account for engineers’ overrep-resentation: in groups in which members are selected by recruiters, engineers are less frequent than they are in groups in which members are self-recruited...
Frustrazione e mentalità: entrambi gli ingredienti sono essenziali affinché emerga il terrorista tipo...
... Engineers possess not so much a proclivity to extremism as such but to extremism of a certain type. In the case of MENA countries, relative deprivation and ideological propensity worked together: the former selected elite graduates and the latter boosted the share of engineers among them...
Fattori sociali e personali interagiscono con esiti nefasti. Ideologia e bisogni emotivi si mescolano producendo la micidiale miscela del terrorismo islamico...
... different ideologies meet the cognitive and emotional needs of different people...
