Terrorist violence and the enrollment of psychology in predicting Muslim extremism: critical terrorism studies meets critical algorithm studies

ABSTRACT

Discourse on terrorist violence has long facilitated an especially liberal form of securitisation. Originally evoked in reference to anarchists and communists, a rational consideration of terrorist violence, inaugurated by the concept, asks for deferred judgement about the nature of, or reasons behind, violence related to terror on the premise that state and international legal norms governing the legitimate use of violence fail to circumscribe the proper capacities of the state to regulate and explain terrorism. Where sovereign powers along with their military and civilian instruments of coercion are deemed unable to regulate violence effectively, analysts of terrorist violence and their readership are invited to consider and cultivate new sensibilities. Beginning in the 1980s, studies by psychologists found renewed urgency among a growing cadre of interdisciplinary terror experts who found religion, Islam especially, a key variable of analysis. I situate their contributions in a longer history of secular and racialising discourse about terrorist violence. Central to this history are practices of reading, translating, interpreting and archiving texts. Evidence for the argument is based on the analysis of an algorithm that allegedly predicts the likelihood of terrorist strikes by counting words spoken by al-Qaʿida leaders and correlating their frequency with over 30 psychological categories.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical terrorism studies
• discourse
• security
• Islamophobia
• political violence
• al-Qaʿida
• secularism
• prediction
• algorithm

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As guest editor, Allison Smith (2011, 88) acknowledges that “In 2005, the UN Security Council 1267 Committee added MIRA to its list of individuals and entities belonging to or associated with the Taliban and the al-Qaʿida organization, and the US Treasury designated MIRA as providing material support to al-Qaʿida”. US Executive Order no. 13,224, issued around the same time, reiterated the group’s financial and material support of al-Qaʿida. Such designations ensured MIRA’s legal categorisation as a terrorist organisation on multiple fronts. In 2012, a year after the journal was published, MIRA’s leader Saad al-Faqih was removed from the UN Security Council’s terrorist list. US and Saudi officials remained unimpressed.

2. This finding was procured through searches using Proquest Historical Newspapers (The New York Times), Google Books, Google Scholar, ProQuest PAIS International, Legaltrac, PsychInfo, JSTOR, Early English Books on Line and the American Indians and the American West, 1809–1971.

3. C.f. Chinese communist insurgency near Shanghai (Abend 1932, 6); Austrian Deutsche-Front collaboration with state police (“Saar Territory” 1934, 1171); and Indian National Congress sympathies for civil disobedience (French 1937, 472).

4. Usage of the phrase “terrorist-violence” increased by 1975% over the 2001–2017 period versus 1686% for the word “terrorism”. In raw figures, there were 83 mentions of the former term versus 8271 for terrorism, whereas between 1981 and 2000 there were only 4 and 463 mentions, respectively.

5. This assessment is based on statistics from disciplinary databases of important works and papers, as well as specific disciplinary journals. When comparing mentions of the phrase “terrorist violence” between 1 January 1981 and 31 December 2000 with the period from 1 January 2001 to 5 March 2017, JSTOR databases of journals, for example, reveal a 900% increase in psychology (as measured in 43 journals) versus 300% in religion (170 journals), 102% in political science (347 journals), 83% in sociology (209 journals), 80% in Middle East Studies (82 journals) and 40% in law (189 journals).

6. For Bruno Latour (2005, 28–9), “enrolment” explains the ways in which forms of social life and social actors so often considered real and objective by social scientists, psychologists and other scholarly communities are, in fact, integral components of ongoing, uncertain and ever-shifting relations between groups.

7. According to Google Scholar (on 5 July 2017), LIWC’s findings have been cited on 6380 occasions, favourably in every instance from what I can tell. Terrorism studies publications, often commending Pennebaker’s incisive content analysis, include Altier (2012), Barker (2009), Brynielsson (2013), Glasgow (2014b), Weinstein (2009).

8. Professor Merari was chair of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Psychology at the time. Earlier studies drawing on modern psychology to argue for Muslims’ special deviancy include Glidden (1972), Patai (1973), Lewis (1976), Kaplan (1979), Mullany (1980), Sirrala (1980).

9. Writing in the Journal of American Psychiatry, Harold Glidden (1972: 985–7), for example, a US State Department official in charge of the Near East Division of the Bureau of Research and Intelligence, contrasts Arab-Islamic “shame” and its consequence incentive for “revenge” with Jews’ and Western Christians’ emphasis on mere “guilt”. For humiliation, see Alderdice (2005); for vulnerability, see Lachkar (2006).

10. See Stampnitsky (2013: 23–6) for an overview.

11. Word count based on the 2015 English LIWC dictionary.

12. http://liwc.wpengine.com/ (accessed 23 August 2017).

13. http://www.analyzewords.com/ (accessed 23 August 2017).

14. C.f. works by Louise Amoore and Antoinette Rouvroy, discussed in the final section of the article. The Social Media Collective, founded in the United States in 2009, has helped give shape to the field of critical algorithm studies. Its introductory reading list can be found at https://socialmediacollective.org/reading-lists/critical-algorithm-studies/ As noted by Tarleton Gillespie (2014, 68), “What we need is an interrogation of algorithms as a key feature of our information ecosystem […] and of the cultural forms emerging in their shadows […] with a close attention to where and in what ways the introduction of algorithms into human knowledge practices may have political ramifications”.

15. Personal communication with James Pennebaker, 11 September 2008.

16. Following the Merriam-Webster dictionary, liberalism can be defined as “a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties; specifically: such a philosophy that considers government as a crucial instrument for amelioration of social inequities (such as those involving race, gender, or class)”. In this article, liberalism celebrates the triumph of the secular over religious sentiment and its dark twin, extremism.

17. Bin Laden’s 1996 “declaration” of war, for example, was originally penned as a “letter” (risala), becoming the former only after revisions in light of an interview with the British journalist Robert Fisk (see Miller 2015, 250–1).

18. Disclosure hinges on emotionalism: those who write about emotional topics are more likely to experience improved physical health than those who write on superficial topics (see Campbell and Pennebaker 2003). Key to healthful recovery is developing a personal narrative (see Stone and Pennebaker 2002).

19. Although a career psychiatrist, Post’s credentials as a pioneering psychologist are affirmed widely by leading scholars in security studies, political science, engineering and psychology itself (c.f. the first 20 entries on Google Scholar when searching with the keywords “psychologist Jerrold Post”. Search conducted on 20 June 2018).

20. For several benchmark analyses of shortcomings in psychological studies of militant extremism, see Victoroff (2005) and Riech (1998). As Colin Wight (2009) notes, what most psychological studies miss is the point that any concept of terrorism already implies the concept of the state and hence cannot be understood without an accompanying theory of political communication.

21. Online catalogue available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/mssa.ms.1880.

22. Available at http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/ubl-fbis.pdf.

23. My data set does not include al-Zawahiri’s discourse. According to the authors (Pennebaker and Chung 2009, 459), the texts by both al-Qaʿida leaders feature an average word count of 2495.4, for 42 “statements” and 3329.2 words for 10 “interviews”. Given that 36 of 58 texts (62%) were authored exclusively by bin Laden, the total word count for his material alone can be estimated to be 87,741.

24. With exception-word averages of 2.72 and 2.62 for bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, respectively, versus 3.17 for an assembly of extremist speeches studied by psychologist Allison Smith in 2004.

25. Among the authors’ assertions about al-Qaʿida’s distinctive group identity is that they “pay less attention to past events” than other groups studied by Allison Smith in 2004. LIWC’s processing of the audio recording archive reveals the “past” score – a mean percentage of total past-tense words per text file – to be higher (at 3.45) than that in Smith’s corpus (2.94) in all but three cases, two of them in bin Laden’s latest speeches in this archive (in 1998 and 2000). The FBIS archive’s “past” score is 2.41 with a decline from higher scores in earlier years. Global print and electronic media appear to have made bin Laden less concerned with the past. This finding mirrors arguments by Western counterterrorism officials and Arab state leaders alike that al-Qaʿida represents a “new terrorism” different from earlier forms and especially foreign to traditions of Islamic thought and orthopraxy.

26. “Al-Qaʿida’s sense of identity is more strongly defined through an oppositional group or government, as indicated by their higher use of third person pronouns” (ibid., 462).

27. The comparative control group is a collection of 166 texts from 17 extremist groups gathered and analysed by Allison Smith (2004).

28. Excerpt from recording no. 507 in the Islamic Fundamentalist Audio Recordings Collection (MS 1880). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library (my own translation).

29. Following much contemporary scholarship, “the secular” is approached here not through a binarisation of religious/non-religious domains but rather as a liberal project with its own religious genealogies, not the least of them Protestant Enlightenment ones emphasising private interiority and “belief”.

30. Avner Falk (2008, 139–140) simply identifies bin Laden’s “not me” as the United States, binary opposite of the all-good “Muslim ummah”, and attributes the split to his early abandonment by his mother.

31. Pennebaker and Chung (2009, 464) effectively abdicate professional therapeutic responsibilities upheld in their work elsewhere: “We realise that our interpretations of the meaning extraction results are superficial. This is where the expertise of the intelligence and diplomatic communities is needed. As computer language analysts, we can say which words hang together. Unfortunately, without deep knowledge of the authors and context, we are restricted in knowing what the themes may reflect”. In granting intelligence agents and diplomats the authority to truly understand extremist subjectivity, the authors not only sideline contributions from scholars in the humanities or social sciences best suited to study such a phenomenon but also cede knowledge and the ethics of managing its application to American-led global security regimes.

32. Amoore borrows the term “architecture of enmity” from Derek Gregory (2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Flagg Miller

Flagg Miller is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Davis.  Author of The Audacious Ascetic: What the bin Laden Tapes Reveal about Al-Qaʿida (2015), Flagg focuses on cultures of modern Muslim reform in the Middle East and especially Yemen. His first book was The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen (2007).