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“Defeating IS Ideology” Sounds Good, But What Does It

Really Mean?
J.M. Berger 6 Jun 2017

As surely as night follows day, demands to defeat “the ideology” emerge after
a terrorist attack, in increasingly urgent tones. After the terrorist
attack Saturday night in London, Prime Minister Theresa May offered the
latest iteration of that ritual, a refrain heard since the days of George W.
Bush:
Defeating this ideology is one of the great challenges of our time, but it
cannot be defeated by military intervention alone. … It will only be defeated
when we turn people’s minds away from this violence and make them
understand that our values – pluralistic British values – are superior to
anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate.

After more than a decade, such pronouncements ring hollow. Not only are
there more adherents to some form of jihadism than ever before, but many of
these adherents subscribe to an even more violent version of jihadist
ideology – the toxic, apocalyptic strain of extremism embodied by so-called
Islamic State (IS).

The population of jihadist supporters remains tiny by virtually any objective

measure, and we are not losing the War of Ideas in any meaningful sense.
Violent jihadist extremism remains a marginal activity carried out on the
fringes by fractional percentages of Muslim populations. Nevertheless, it
should be obvious that the West’s obsessive focus on combatting ideology
has produced no quantifiably positive results.
In part, this is because policymakers use the word ideology without knowing
what it means. That doesn’t mean they are clueless about what groups like IS
believe(although many certainly are). Rather, there is a fundamental lack of
curiosity about how extremist ideologies work, in the broadest sense. For
politicians and many policy makers, ideology is a magical, formless, mostly-
Islamic force that bends vulnerable minds toward violence.
There are three structural elements of an extremist ideology: contents,
identity, and distribution. When most people refer to an ideology, they are
talking about the contents – the texts extremists cite and the values they
purport to represent. This element prompts the most discussion, but it
provides the least utility. In fact, my research suggests that attacking the
contents of an ideology may escalate extremist views by prompting
ideologues to craft new and more pernicious justifications.
The next-most discussed element is distribution, and reasonably so. If an
ideology cannot be transmitted, it cannot be adopted. In her speech, Prime
Minister May reiterated a view that is increasingly popular among policy
makers and pundits – that “the internet, and the big companies that provide
internet-based services” are responsible for the spread of radical ideologies
and suggesting that online content must be drastically regulated.

But while it is true that social media is uniquely empowering to extremists,

what most policymakers and commentators fail to recognise is that efforts to
control IS’s activities online have peaked. I was among the
first and loudest advocates of kicking terrorists off social media, and I fought
long and hard for years to make people realise that suspending terrorists’
social media accounts would reduce their reach.
So believe me when I tell you: there is not much more that can be done.

I wrote last year that IS’s efforts on social media had reached a point of
diminishing returns. Since then, its position on open platforms like Twitter
and Facebook has remained under heavy pressure and scoring consistently
low metrics. As of March, the median Arabic-language account openly
supporting IS on Twitter had about 14 followers and could only stay online for
about a day before being suspended. (These metrics are based on
measurements I took from late 2016 through spring 2017. A colleague
independently confirmed the figures using a different methodology).
In other words, our efforts to control IS on open social media platforms have
also reached the point of diminishing returns. We need to maintain the
pressure, and we have a few tactical plays remaining, but there is not much
room left for large-scale improvements.

Placing further demands on Facebook, Twitter and Google will not solve the
problem. Would-be killers do not need to follow IS on Twitter in order to learn
how to drive a car into a crowd of pedestrians. They can get that from the
mainstream news, which faithfully amplifies both the propaganda and attacks
of IS. It is neither desirable nor possible to create a total information
blackout, and continually escalating regulation of speech will lead our free
societies to a dark place.

The final element of ideology is identity. Here, there may be opportunities for
new approaches. The concept of identity has been relatively neglected in
policy circles, despite its paramount importance to extremist movements.
My research has shown that extremist ideology describe an in-group based on
race, religion or nationality, and they provide a parallel description of an
opposing out-group. A movement becomes extremist when it believes the in-
group can never be successful unless it is engaged in hostile activity against
the out-group.

Extremists create a narrative justification for their beliefs by linking the out-
group to a crisis afflicting the in-group, and linking the in-group to a violent
solution against the out-group. The greater the perceived crisis, the more
violent and extreme the solution. These linkages are the substance of an
extremist ideology, and as such, they are vulnerable to counter-programming.
The sweeping absolutes preferred by politicians are ill-suited to this task,
whether the Bush administration’s efforts at democracy promotion, the
Obama administration’s efforts to discredit the religious legitimacy of groups
like IS, or May’s assertion of the “superiority of British values”. Democracy
promotion, in the form of the Iraq war, created a zone of instability that
extremists enthusiastically exploited. Simplistic attacks on legitimacy are, at
best, ineffective, and at worst, risk fueling an escalation in extremist views
(as argued at length here). And asserting a competing identity may enhance
the in-group/out-group dynamic, or worse, create competing extremist
movement.
Too often, the concept of “defeating the terrorists’ ideology” is conflated with
deradicalisation – an amorphous transformation in which potential extremists
adopt nebulously defined pro-social values. In the short term, a more
pragmatic approach is to pursue policies that promote disengagement from
extremist movements, a task that can be defined concretely and evaluated
based on tangible factors.
Deradicalisation is a worthwhile goal for the long-term, after disengagement
has been accomplished. Studying the dynamics of identity construction may
provide actionable insights into how to approach this problem and how to
measure results. To begin this process, policymakers and practitioners must
first exchange their romanticised notions of ideology for a more grounded
definition.

We should also be clear: there is no silver bullet that will eradicate violent
extremism from the world. It may be admirable to strive toward that goal, but
our expectations must be tempered with realism.

Extremist movements endure for generations, even in the face of utter defeat.
In America, the Ku Klux Klan survived decades of near-total marginalisation
and may now be poised for a comeback of sorts. The Nazis suffered an
overwhelming military loss and met with sweeping condemnation from nearly
the entire world, yet its name and ideas linger on. In both cases, kinetic
efforts (law enforcement for the former, and military action against the latter)
were arguably far more decisive than ideological combat. But those victories
were complemented and supported by social movements that arose to
counter their pernicious worldviews.
Similarly, we should not pin our hopes on the idea that we can exterminate
the ideology of IS in a decade or two. The battle against terrorism remains
necessary and worthwhile, in both social and kinetic realms. We can and
must continue to improve our understanding of extremism, and the underlying
structure and function of extremist ideologies. But simply reciting “defeat the
ideology” as a meaningless mantra serves very little purpose, especially
when such discussions become mired in politics. To combat violent
ideologies, we must continually work to move the conversation out of the
clouds and on to the ground.