Can university subjects reveal terrorists in the making?

[Eugen Leitl]

(of course -- I am one)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227127.200-can-university-subjects-reveal-terrorists-in-the-making.html?full=true&print=true

Can university subjects reveal terrorists in the making?

* 15 June 2009 by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog

* Magazine issue 2712. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

How can we spot future terrorists? There may be clues in the subjects they
study (Image: Gaza Press / Rex Features)

Editorial: Seeking out the engineers of terror

WHO becomes a terrorist? An MI5 report leaked to London newspaper The
Guardian in August 2008 concluded that there is no easy way to identify those
who become involved in terrorism in the UK because there is "no single
pathway to violent extremism" and that "it is not possible to draw up a
typical profile of the 'British terrorist' as most are 'demographically
unremarkable'".

The extraordinary lengths the German authorities went to after 9/11 to track
down potential terrorists are a stark example of how useless profiling can
be. They collected and analysed data on over 8 million individuals living in
Germany. These people were categorised by demographic characteristics: male,
aged 18 to 40; current or former student; Muslim; legally resident in
Germany; and originating from one of 26 Islamic countries. Then they were
sorted into three further categories: potential to carry out a terrorist
attack (such as a pilot's licence); familiarity with locations that could be
targets (such as working in airports, nuclear power plants, chemical plants,
the rail service, labs and other research institutes); and studying the
German language at the Goethe Institute.

With the help of these categories authorities whittled the 8 million down to
just 1689 individuals, who were then investigated, one by one. Giovanni
Capoccia, an Oxford-based political scientist who analysed this case,
reported that not one of them turned out to be a threat. All the real Islamic
terrorists arrested in Germany through other investigations were not on the
official "shortlist" and did not fit the profile.

Does it follow, as some scholars now think, that anyone, given the right
conditions and the wrong friendships, can end up joining a terrorist group?
Not entirely. We found that engineers are three to four times as likely as
other graduates to be present among the members of violent Islamic groups in
the Muslim world since the 1970s. Using a sample of 404 Islamic militants
worldwide (with a median birth date in 1966), we tracked down the education
of 284. Of these, 26 had less than secondary education, 62 completed
secondary education (including madrasas), and 196 had higher education,
whether completed or not. Even if none of the cases where we lack data had
higher education, the share of those with higher education would be a hefty
48.5 per cent.

The next move was to find out what they had studied - and we tracked down 178
of our 196 cases. The largest single group were engineers, with 78 out of
178, followed by 34 taking Islamic studies, 14 studying medicine, 12
economics and business studies, and 7 natural sciences. The
over-representation of engineers applies to all 13 militant groups in the
sample and to all 17 nationalities, with the exception of Saudi Arabia.

Our finding holds up quite well in another sample of 259 Islamic extremists
who are citizens or residents of 14 western, mostly European, countries, and
who have recently come to the attention of the authorities for carrying out
or plotting a terrorist attack in the west. Although this sample contains far
fewer people with higher education than the older members of the first group,
nearly 6 out of 10 of those with higher education are engineers.

We also collected data on non-Muslim extremists. We found that engineers are
almost completely absent from violent left-wing groups, while they are
present among violent right-wing groups in different countries. Out of seven
right-wing leaders in the US whose degrees we were able to establish, four
were engineers: for example, Richard Butler, the founder of the neo-Nazi
group Aryan Nations, was an aeronautical engineer, and Wilhelm Schmitt,
leader of the right-wing, extreme anti-government, pro-localism group known
as the Sheriff's Posse Comitatus, was an engineer with Lockheed Martin. Among
the total membership of the Islamic groups, however, the over-representation
is still much higher.

This could be a coincidence: if the group founders are engineers they would
also be more likely to recruit other engineers via their educational or
professional networks. This explanation only works up to a point. It does not
explain why engineers are over-represented in groups in which the founders
were not engineers, or why the founders of groups that were not in contact
with each other were often engineers.

Why engineers? Everybody's first reaction is that they are recruited for
their technical proficiency in bomb-making and communications technology, but
there is no evidence for this. A tiny elite tends to do the technical work in
these groups, and jihadist recruitment manuals focus on a personality profile
rather than technical skills.

So we are left with two hypotheses: either certain social conditions impinge
more on engineers than on other graduates, or engineers are more likely to
have certain personality traits that make radical Islamism more attractive to
them. Our best guess is that the phenomenon derives from a combination of
these two factors.

With engineers in the Middle East we have very intelligent, ambitious
students who have found it difficult to find professional satisfaction, both
individually and collectively in their desire to help their countries
develop. Graduates of very selective degree programmes, they may have endured
relatively greater frustration in a stagnant and authoritarian environment.

The fact that engineers are not over-represented in Saudi Arabia offers some
support for this, for, alone among the countries of origin of terrorists,
Saudi Arabia has had a shortage of engineers and has thus offered better
employment opportunities. However, even in western countries and south-east
Asia, where labour market opportunities are better for all graduates,
engineers appear relatively more attracted to violent Islamist groups than
other graduates. Why is this?

We reckon that something else is going on, something at the individual level,
that is, relating to cognitive traits. According to polling data, engineering
professors in the US are seven times as likely to be right-wing and religious
as other academics, and similar biases apply to students. In 16 other
countries we investigated, engineers seem to be no more right-wing or
religious than the rest of the population, but the number of engineers
combining both traits is unusually high. A lot of piecemeal evidence suggests
that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that
society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic
politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers.

US engineering professors are seven times as likely to be right-wing and
religious

So the bottom line is that while the probability of a Muslim engineer
becoming a violent Islamist is minuscule, it is still be between three and
four times that for other graduates.

Read more: The making of a suicide bomber

Profile

Diego Gambetta is official fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. Steffen Hertog
is Kuwait Professor at the Chaire Moyen Orient-Miditerranie, Sciences Po,
Paris. Their book, Engineers of Jihad, will be published next year by
Princeton University Press