Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Marc Sageman says al Qaeda is a loose network, small groups of guys hanging out, not in the pursuit of an objective or a political goal but just satisfying the demands of their small social network, even if that includes carrying out acts of terror.
Marc Sageman, on the other hand, says al Qaeda is a loose network, small groups of guys hanging out, not in the pursuit of an objective or a political goal but just satisfying the demands of their small social network even if that includes carrying out acts of terror.
That sounds more like it to me. What do you think?
I think this is a problem you get when you are looking at an organisation from above and below. Both are true. If you look at any phenomenon that involves leaders… Take Communism, for example. You had small groups of revolutionaries who called themselves Bolsheviks and had a coherent political philosophy for which they were willing to fight. That doesn’t explain, however, why Joe Smith in America decided to join the Communist Party. He could have had all sorts of social and economic reasons for joining which, again, do nothing to describe where the Bolsheviks come from or what they’re up to. So the two theories are not contradictory. They only seem contradictory if you say: mine is the only theory and yours is wrong.
Do people say that?
Well, I’m not going to name anyone individually, but academics can be that way sometimes.
Have we covered Sageman?
No. I would like to add that Sageman offers an explanation for individual motivations for terrorism. He looked at 400 European members of terrorist organisations and asked them the questions you’d expect – about poverty, lack of opportunities, lack of education. The responses showed that the terrorists had more education than was average, belonged to a higher socio-economic class and had more opportunities, not less. That is the revolutionary thing about Sageman’s work.
Read full interview
Mary Habeck is Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, strategic and security issues and American defence policy. Habeck has held appointments at the National Security Council, served as Associate Professor of History at Yale University, coordinated the Yale Russian Archive Project to facilitate access to documents in the former Soviet archives and is the recipient of the 2001-02 Morse Fellowship. She has a PhD in history from Yale. She has contributed to The Journal of Military History, The International History Review, The Journal of Modern History and others. She says the US contributed to insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan by failing to peel off those with local grievances and treating all insurgents as al Qaeda-linked terrorists.
