David Austin: In the 21st century, terrorism continues to be a phenomenon that plagues countries all around the world. In this Foreseeable podcast, Associate Professor in Practice Francesco Mancini gives us insights on terrorism and how it continues in the future.
Could you start with the definition of terrorism for us, especially maybe for younger people who may only think of it as what they see on the news?
Francesco Mancini: So, terrorism is actually a very old phenomenon and is traditionally considered a tactic, and is generally the tactic of the weak, meaning groups that don't really have an army at their disposal and they are generally facing a stronger enemy. So they use terrorism as a hit-and-run tactic. We've seen that throughout history. Think about the US Civil War, for example, where smaller groups that want to resist a certain force use these terrorist tactics.
Although we kind of know what terrorism is, there isn't an agreed-upon definition. The United States, for example, has multiple definitions depending if you look from an intelligence point of view, from defence, or from the State Department. But overall, we all agree that terrorism is an act of violence that is ideologically motivated by some kind of political goal and traditionally targets civilians. That means it is not an attack during a combat operation, for example. It actually targets bystanders or people not in uniform or normal civilians.
There was a famous G7 meeting in the 1990s where there was a conversation around the definition of terrorism and the overall agreement was that we don't actually need a definition of terrorism. It's a bit like pornography; we know what it is when we see it and we can still do counter-terrorist measures without having a full-fledged definition.
David Austin: What are some of those counter measures? Can you give us a state of how terrorism is viewed in the world today and what's being done to address it?
Francesco Mancini: So one of the evolutions in the trends of terrorism that we've seen is that it [has] moved from being more politically, ideologically motivated. If you think about Europe in the 70s, you can even think of Southeast Asia, obviously with a lot of the left-wing and fringe using terrorist tactics. It has moved away from that into becoming more religiously motivated, and this is a trend that has also become more complicated, because it points out a particular religion to be more prone to radicalisation. Which is also not true, it's just that the particular historical moment which we are in sees most of these terrorist attacks coming from a particular set of groups. The phenomena of radicalisation is something that cuts across different cultures, different religions and different political ideology.
David Austin: If terrorism is a tactic, then what do you think of when the United States declares war on terrorism, which is like a war on a tactic. Policy-wise, is that helpful?
Francesco Mancini: No, I never thought that it was a helpful framework and I think we also have seen after close to 20 years of that policy that there are some substantive challenges here. I think one key challenge is that making the war on terror your key foreign policy framework is very limiting, because the reality is that there are many other geopolitical challenges that end up being overlooked.
And I think if you look at what the US has done in the last 15 years, it's a concentrated effort in certain parts of the world while other things were happening somewhere else. So that's a sort of strategic mistake. But as you said, secondly, you can't really declare war on a tactic. The effort is way more complex than that. And that goes into the conversation on what to do with it, right? But the complexity of terrorism does not lend itself to having one grand strategy.
David Austin: So what are the more prudent ways to address it?
Francesco Mancini: So let's start with a general principle. So, overall you have to think about terrorism as having two dimensions. One dimension is geographical, meaning that a terrorist movement is global, regional as well as domestic. All these three interact with each other, and if you think for example, Southeast Asia, and I think of the case of the siege of Marawi in Mindanao, Philippines. Those armed combatants had influences that were coming from abroad, that were coming from the regional dimension, and were obviously very localised as well because of the history of Mindanao. So these three levels always matter.
Then there is a second dimension which is multi-policy. Terrorism generally is a problem that is addressed as and considered a security issue. Of course it is, and it is a security intelligence and law enforcement issue. But terrorism is also a social issue, it's also an educational issue, and I would even say it's an economic issue. So it's a typical problem that has to be tackled with what we call an all-of-society approach. I'm saying all of society on purpose; it is not all of government because it's not just about government agencies coordinating with each other but it's also involving communities, private sectors and so on so forth. So that's in terms of broad principles.
Now when it comes to actual concrete policies, obviously the front is intelligence, is law enforcement, is prevention. The reason why we are always very worried about terrorists is because one attack is enough. So if you just look at the statistics, you're more likely to be hit by a car than be blown up by terrorists, but that's the wrong way of thinking about it. It's because just one attack can have not only physical implications, but also a lot of psychological implications. Undermining a society, creating other issues and the backlash of that can have repercussions in policies for many years. So that's why we're so worried. Even just one case is bad enough.
But there are many studies out there that try to understand why people move toward violent means to achieve whatever they have in mind, and there is no one single theory. Nobody will tell you, in all honesty, that there is one reason why someone becomes radicalised and decides to commit an act of violence. There are many factors. Some factors might be due to particular alienation within societies that might have to do with economics. It could also be the fact that in your second or third generation [as a] foreigner in a country where you feel that you're not integrated, being frustrated and so on so forth. There are a lot of education factors. We know for a fact that a lot of people that become radicalised are actually not really experts of that religion, so they get manipulated very easily. Another element is obviously the cyber sphere. Radicalisation doesn't happen today in a church, in a mosque or a synagogue, it's actually happening online and that makes it so much harder for a country to control that conversation.
And all these elements play together, which means obviously that a country or state has to develop policies that are coherent with each other and that work with all these factors.
One thing that is also very linked to how people see the rule of law is preventive arrest. If you look at preventive arrest, most experts will tell you that it's actually necessary, but we know that in some societies, this is very controversial. So I'm not advocating this as a cut across, it really depends on the context, but we know that is actually something that can be very useful. That has obviously to be combined with policies of rehabilitation and reintegration. And today we know that policies of reintegration and rehabilitation work if they are targeting not only the individual that has been radicalised but also his community, family, relatives and the community around him.
So it's much more complex. The very first attempts at de-radicalisation programmes were just targeting individuals. And today we know it's actually much better to target the overall social environment.
David Austin: Would you like to talk about the situation in the Asian region? Because obviously, you know the Middle East and the Caliphate and ISIS, Al-Qaeda, those have been the faces of terrorism if you will, at least in the way the media presents it. But, as a tactic that can be used by any group or any individual, let's say starting from China, what are the hot spots? What are the areas? And what are the groups that are causing trouble?
Francesco Mancini: You're right to link all these to dynamics in the Middle East. Obviously, a lot of the dynamics are coming into Islamism. We were talking about only Islamist radicalisation, but obviously there are many other groups have been radicalised and commit a lot of crimes. In Myanmar there are many cases of radicalised Buddhists that are committing acts of terror, but we focus on the Islamist radicalisation. The starting point is very much in the Middle East not only in terms of the reading of the particular Islamic jurisprudence, but also the political dynamics that have created triggers for acts of terror.
A lot has been said about ISIS and the fact that they seized territory in Syria. This is a very unusual terrorist tactic. Terrorists do not seize territory. When they do that, they generally lose, and that's very coherent because generally if you are a terrorist organisation, you don't have the forces to face an army. So I [was not] surprised when Da'esh lost control of Raqqa and other places in Syria because obviously there is no way that they can face armies. So that was a kind of aberration of seizing a territory. What concerned us the most is that people are being radicalised in this context and they're moving back to their own countries, bringing with them not only the ideology but also training and the capacity to perpetrate terrorist acts.
Now in Southeast Asia, experts say there are approximately 60 different groups that pledge their loyalty to Da'esh, Al-Qaida, broadly speaking. Not all might have operational capability, but they're obviously present and have followers, and we know for sure that [there have been] constant attempts to strike some attacks and we've seen it.
Indonesia has seen periodically, not only the big Bali bomb attack in 2002, but other attacks in different locations, in Jakarta. Then I think the big turning point in this region was the Marawi Siege, where not only the Philippine government, but I think everybody was taken by surprise. And in fact, it took months to regain control of the city with a lot of victims — 900 foreign fighters, thousands of civilians. It was very bloody, and I think ASEAN overall realised that they were not really ready for these kinds of operations.
Since then, there's been a bit of a scale up in cooperation and moving from cooperation to collaboration, working together. I think that was a big moment.
Then obviously you have pockets. China is been affected by terrorist acts in different parts, particularly in certain regions where the ideology of radicalised Islamists is more present, which is the region which borders Kazakhstan. And then you have Myanmar, obviously the case of terrorists there. And moving towards the West, you go to South Asia.
South Asia actually has quite a tradition of terrorist attacks, both in India and Pakistan, and Sri Lanka very recently. Talking about being taken by surprise — that was also a big surprise, right? I think the Sri Lanka government was really taken by surprise. And then obviously moving towards Central Asia, we have Afghanistan. But in some contexts, terrorism becomes a war strategy and tactic, and this is particularly in the case of Afghanistan. In other places it's linked to liberation movements, right? So they're all kind of different, I don't want to make one single basket of all these phenomena, but I'm just highlighting hot spots of particular terrorist issues that are present in Asia.
David Austin: And then I suppose we should mention like the New Zealand event with white nationalists, that sort of ideology.
Francesco Mancini: Absolutely. So moving a bit south and east, you see also how radicalisation is not limited to a particular ideology or a particular religion. It's something that cuts across and it was this horrible act of violence [that] was also somehow reverberated and kind of multiplied through online, through the cyber sphere and that's kind of a new phenomenon to some extent.
David Austin: Let's talk about that then because I know that the online sphere is affecting so much of life these days and terrorism or radicalisation, manipulation, changing the narrative, this is all sort of new over the last 10 years, with the proliferation of mobile devices, internet penetration all this. Talk a little bit more about the way that people are being manipulated online, how they're being recruited and how they're finding each other or what's the dynamic going on?
Francesco Mancini: This is, as you said, a very new phenomenon, where most of the radicalisation today happens through online means. Either it's watching videos or reading particular tweets and bits and pieces of things. And sometimes I would also say through the framing of certain global events that they then become a trigger, an inspiration and motivation. You know in the 70s, the big motivation for some of the Islamist radicalisation was the Palestinian fight. Today, that has lost centrality in the narrative and it has moved to different areas, right? There was Afghanistan at some point and obviously there was all the phenomena that were triggered by the so-called Arab Spring. All that narrative has become much more central now and part of this phenomenon is manipulation online and it becomes a sort of motivation.
That's why in this part of the world, in Southeast Asia, a lot of people very concerned about some of the events in the Rakhine state in Myanmar, because the violence perpetrated against the Muslim minority can be then portrayed as yet another injustice to the community and then can create further radicalisation.
It looks like that some of these terrorists are very good at using social media. They actually produce videos and products online that somehow are replicating some of the most sleek you know, Hollywood trailers kinds of products. So the fact is that those who develop these ideologies are actually better than those who are trying to counter these narratives.
If you look at some of the videos posted by someone trying to counter that, they're kind of boring. Kind of a traditional theme with someone talking and basically saying that this is wrong, but all studies show that it is not good enough to say that you are wrong. I'm not going to convince you by just saying or replying to your post and say, "No that's wrong". That's not how it works. So we all need to get much more advanced in the way we use social media tools because all of these terrorist groups are actually very cutting-edge.
David Austin: And they have the advantage of the things that engage people online, [which are] are anger, controversy. Those are the things that help an idea become viral, whereas talking reasonably about a subject in a measured way does not get shared as much. Is there any data about how to counter the narrative?
Francesco Mancini: Well, so first of all in the last few years, all social media companies have scaled up, in a massive way, their own counter-measures. I know, it may be a bit late, but now it's happening. It's happening in a big way.
And I think the example of the Christchurch incident that we just mentioned was actually an accelerator of that. The fact that the video was actually seen for like 12 hours online is something that is completely unacceptable. The reality is that artificial intelligence is still not good enough to pick up these things, that is to say, it's not fast enough to pick up these things. It's also because there is a flagging system that someone then has to check. You also have to think that all these happened in many languages, sometimes in many dialects. Just think about Indonesia. So to do that is not just about having a machine learning process and artificial intelligence process that can pick up on that, but you actually need experts who are able to understand that language, pick up the things, and then take it out. And I'm talking about verbal but think about the nonverbal. Images and so on so forth.
So we know that technology will do a lot to help us eventually, but I don't think we're there yet. So it's inevitable that things are still surfacing. But with that said, I know on a daily basis, thousands of these materials are constantly taken out of the online [sphere]. That's where we are.
David Austin: So that's a regulatory approach, putting the onus on the tech companies like Facebook, making them responsible for images. You've talked about the community already and inter-religious dialogue and that sort of thing. Is that being done in social media in any way that can provide a counter to the terrorist narrative or to the radicalised narrative?
Francesco Mancini: Yes, it has been done. And so there are community-based organisations that are using social media to counter the narrative. I know because our school actually we do some training for these people, and we bring in communities from different parts of Southeast Asia and maybe with a social media company to discuss how to scale up their efforts, help them to say, "Okay, you know your topic. Now let me tell you how you can use our tool online to make your message more effective to reach more people" and so on so forth. So this is happening and it's happening in a big way.
David Austin: Now's the time I'd like to for you look into the future, give us a bit of what you foresee. You've already said that the collaboration has improved but that still you would say the region's not ready. So what do you foresee in the next maybe 5 to 10 years? How do you think this is going to progress?
Francesco Mancini: My sense is that terrorism is a phenomenon that is here to stay. And I think in the next few years, we will see more cases rather than less. A lot of these also require time to be implemented, right? So the process of radicalisation is not something that happens overnight. You slowly develop certain affiliations with a certain way of thinking and then slowly become radicalised, then you meet the people who can actually bring you into certain groups, and so this takes time.
As we've seen some of the events that happened in this year, in the region, in Mindanao, in Myanmar, and maybe even in China, where certain reactions might take time to maturate into a more extreme thinking. But I think there are a lot of reasons out there for radicalised people to become violent, and I don't see those reasons disappearing in the near future.
So we know that we have a lot of people out there who have been radicalised and have a violent view of the world. The fact that they cannot really find a cause in the Middle East any longer, at least for now, also means that they will be focused more locally. They will try to do an attack in the wrong context. Less people will now try to go to Syria, just to make a concrete example. So from the front of the threat, I think the threat is up there. It's out there and it'll continue for the next 5 to 10 years.
When it comes to reactions and policies, I think countries are getting better and more sophisticated in dealing with terrorism. I think, taking 9/11 to 2001 as a threshold of thinking, it was a very rough way of dealing with terrorism. Now there's much more sophistication and everybody agrees that this is not just about arresting people or killing terrorists. It's much more than that. And so I can foresee that in the next 5-10 years, countries will implement more sophisticated policies and become more effective in countering the radicalisation online. So that would counter the potential of attacks, so I'm not necessarily foreseeing more attacks, but I'm foreseeing that the issue of extreme radicalisation and violence is still going to be there, and countries will still have to deal with it.
It means that we'll have to put resources in it, which are both money as well as people, as well as intellectual resources to deal with these issues.
David Austin: So it's really just an ongoing battle that's going to have to be addressed for generations?
Francesco Mancini: I think it's ongoing. It can take different shapes in the future; today there may be one particular focus on Islamist radicalisation, tomorrow it might be another, as it was 30, 40 years back, where those were more ideological political movements. But the reality is that you will still have minorities because we have to remember these are very very minority groups, right? But in terrorism, one is bad enough. So we're talking about minorities, very small group of people, but still a group of people that can cause big harm to societies and that's why it has to remain top priority for the years to come.
(Photo: World Trade Centre photos)