[Applause]
[Music]
good evening why do people commit
violent acts what motivates someone to
kill or injure another person this is a
question that has occupied philosophers
since the time of Aristotle or even
before iris tatl and a disclaimer before
we begin we will not be solving this
issue tonight
now terrorism is a topic we’re likely
all familiar with we live in an era too
often marred by terrorist attacks and we
live under more counterterrorism laws
than at any time in history before now
you’re sitting tonight in the
institution of learning yet this
university itself has to practice
counterterrorism all GP surgeries all
hospitals or schools and all
universities all have to practice
counterterrorism to prevent people
becoming involved in terrorist acts so
we’re all very familiar with this topic
whether aware of the legal details or
not but tonight I will help try to help
you see terrorism from a new perspective
not one looking at causes or prediction
but one of understanding the motivations
perhaps of people that get involved in
violent struggle so what do I mean by
this
for tonight’s talk I want to separate
understanding from prediction or causal
analysis or even preventative measures I
want to ask you to think about
understanding as something different
from those kinds of predictive causal
activity when you do a causal analysis
what you do is you have to abstract from
the situation in front of you to do a
causal analysis you have to create a
category a class of phenomenon which
involves basically creating a box and
fitting a very large array of actors and
events inside that one box and
abstracting from the detail of each of
them and the context of each of them so
you collect anti-colonial struggles you
collect
it’s lone wolves who tape automatic
weapons up a high-rise building in Las
Vegas you take Isis you take al-qaeda
and you put them all in the same box and
call it terrorism and when you’re
looking for the causes of terrorism you
generalize you abstract from what each
of these struggles was about and who
each of these people were and instead
you look for what they all hold in
common what is it that they hold in
common that if you took away well would
stop violence from happening is it
mental illness is it poverty is it
exclusion from society and in this type
of causal analysis is very unlikely that
you’d actually go and ask the person why
did you do this so in a causal analysis
you’re unlikely to use a talking
methodology you’re unlikely to actually
ask somebody why did you get involved in
this struggle why would you want to ask
them anyway I mean they’re unreliable
they could lie to you about why you
became involved in political violence
they might even not know the factors
that led them to become involved in
political violence these are all reasons
our causal analysis would give you for
not directly asking the person economic
and statistical methodologies they don’t
really care about the motivation of the
person how they felt before they got
involved in struggle or before they
committed a violent act motivation is is
irrelevant in these types of analyses
also if you have that general enormous
box where you’ve put all the different
actors inside you wouldn’t be able to
talk to every single one of them so why
would you use talking in the first place
but I don’t want to give you the wrong
impression there are some very good
causal analyses out there for example
Robert Pape did a study of every single
suicide bombing between 1980 and 2003
there were 315 if you’re interested
largely they were carried out by the
Marxist Tamil Tigers Association but
there were also some Islamist groups
some Sikh groups some Hindu groups etc
etc and what did he find well he found
that they all held something in common
and that is
an invasion every single case was
correlated with foreign occupation and
this was important because it caused the
use of terrorism as a strategic tactic
if you’ve been invaded by an occupying
force it’s very unlikely that you can
raise an army against that occupying
force you can’t use conventional methods
under a situation of occupation instead
you’ve got massive asymmetry between the
two sides so what do you do you evolve
strategically and suicide bombing
becomes a tactic that’s used more
frequently so is the problem solved do
we know what causes terrorism well I’m
guessing you’re likely not satisfied
with that explanation there’s nothing
wrong with that particular study it’s
just that as people we tend to want to
know the human reasons the motivations
for becoming involved in these type of
acts and that is not included in these
kind of studies if you want to
understand the motivation and the human
reasons for becoming involved in
political violence then you can’t have
that big box of samples that big box of
examples picking different struggles
from all over the world to understand
rather than to know and should try and
predict you have to throw away that box
and focus on one case in particular or
several but do it in depth if you want
to know any kind of answers to the
eternal question of violence why people
behave violently then you need to
understand their motivations and this
involves usually drinking quite a lot of
tea with them and talking to them it
also involves quite a lot of moral
courage so what I’m asking you to do on
this journey with me tonight is to not
instantly bulk at the suggestion that we
might be able to empathize with
terrorists we are trained to do that we
are trained to be very uncomfortable
with feeling any kind of empathy for a
violent person societies have to develop
that way a society develops around
cooperation and has to externalize
violent actors so you may feel
uncomfortable at certain points when I
ask you to listen to the voice of the
terrorists
listening doesn’t necessarily mean
excusing or agreeing it just means there
might be a purpose to listening so you
can retain the ability to disagree with
their actions while you listen to their
stories how are we going to do this how
are we going to talk to people involved
in political violence well we’ve got
some significant access problems I’ll
give you that we can’t exactly decamp to
rocket to go and stand with a microphone
in the streets and try and the interview
Isis it’s too dangerous
also the university would never ever
give any of us research permission to go
out there and do anything however what
we can do is we can speak to historical
militants those who’ve already been
through the prison system and come out
the other side or those who one their
struggles and overturn the state in
question and are now the new leaders
this is what I did for my PhD I went to
Italy to interview ex militants from
what’s called the years of lead which
was in the 70s and the 80s and it’s
called the years of lead because so many
shell casings were supposedly left on
the streets I also went to Cyprus to
interview a ouka who were an anti
colonial insurgency against the British
Empire in the 1950s a ocher in
particular were very elderly by the time
I went to speak to them they’d not ever
been to jail because they won their
struggle they managed to remove the
British Empire from their islands this
wasn’t because they were highly skilled
it was largely quite have put together
with nuts and bolts kind of insurgency
but it was the era of decolonization
where lots of these struggles broke out
across the world and the Empire was
looking and trying to stop them all
simultaneously so what happens when you
go out and you talk to people that have
been involved in political violence and
you ask them their stories enormous
amount of tea an enormous amount of
coffee these stories sometimes go on for
three or four hours so you get very
highly caffeinated by the end of them
soompi
all are still to this day absolutely
stunned that their lives took this turn
and that they ended up smuggling
explosives into a port taking it onto a
ship planting it and managing to get out
again before they sunk the ship by
blowing up the bomb other people are
completely shocked and visibly shocked
that their lives took them down this
path that they shot someone and
assassinated them in the streets of
Italy other people aren’t shocked at all
other people are not ethically
problematizing what they did and don’t
seem to bear any kind of trauma or scars
everybody is different but in each case
people gave human reasons for why they
got involved in violent violent struggle
think about the conditions which might
provoke you to join an armed struggle
and likely you’ll come up with some of
the same reasons that these interviewees
gave to me don’t imagine killing
civilians right now that’s quite a leap
along the path but imagine fighting an
occupying force a tyrant has invaded
your country you’ve tried peaceful
struggle you’ve tried it for decades
decades decades and it hasn’t worked
what if conditions were getting worse
these are the kinds of stories that were
told to me by x-fighters of these
organizations in Cyprus they’d tried
peaceful methods for 70 years before the
insurgency broke out they tried
referendums where over 95% of the
population voted for democracy and
national freedom to remove the Empire
from the island they tried peaceful
protests all through the streets of the
capital and of course nothing worked and
then world war 2 came and the British
Empire needed its colonial subjects to
make up the numbers in fighting against
the Axis powers so they came to Cyprus
with an offer we will give you your
freedom you’ve been asking for it for a
long time we’ll give you your liberation
if you help us fight against the Axis
powers and the Cypriots took the deal
they went and fought on the front lines
came back and as we all know that
promise was betrayed that’s the point
where the story turns towards a national
struggle involving insurgency
the church in Cyprus began to very
vocally support the cause for liberation
and the Greek general General Grievous
arrived on a ship to Cyprus and began to
organize the insurgency with the local
fighters
how do people explain this well they
explained it seeing a chance for freedom
that they’ve been waiting for their
whole lives that even their parents and
grandparents have been waiting for and
they saw their friends joining up so why
wouldn’t they
they narrated themselves as heroes but I
want to emphasize that they are also
responsible for the division of Cyprus
in the years afterwards they may have
fought for freedom and they may have
removed the Empire from their islands
but they later suppress the Turkish
minority with such brutality that Turkey
itself invaded Cyprus and the island
remained split to this day Nicosia is
actually the last divided capital in
Europe it reminds me of a story that I
heard from a man named Uranus who
narrated himself as the perfect heroic
fighter for freedom all he ever wanted
to do was fight for the democracy in his
country and freedom from the air patrol
and they’ve taken two soldiers hostage
and these soldiers were making too much
noise and they were frightened that they
would be discovered by the other groups
of soldiers in the nearby area and so
they knew that they had to kill them and
Yanis was visibly upset by this memory
because he remembers them being
teenagers he said to me we were shocked
the Empire had sent teenagers to fight
us and he was visibly upset when he
explained what happens when you prepare
somebody for their own death especially
when they’re teenagers
or they cry for their mother this is why
awareness has to narrate himself as a
hero he has to live with that memory of
what he’s done he has to stick to that
narrative of it all being for a greater
cause for a greater good but we don’t
necessarily have to agree with his
actions while we empathize with how he
tells his story
in Italy X militants also gave very
human reasons very human stories for how
they became involved in the militant
groups of the years of lead like Cyprus
they’d spent a long time deploying
peaceful protests to try and improve
conditions in Italy in their 60s and 70s
Italy at this time was on the border of
the Soviet Union and the capitalist
Western states it had the largest
Communist Party for decades by this time
it had even won an election after World
War two until the CIA into the end of
recounted the votes so that the
Communist Party didn’t win so they tried
everything to to pursue their goals
peacefully as one person said to me the
movements didn’t wake up one day wanting
to be violence they didn’t wake up
finding automatic weapons under the bed
this had a very long historical and
social build-up it began as a movement
for hope these leftist organizations
they tried to attain housing rights for
people because there were no housing
rights for people in those days they
pursued women’s rights in a conservative
country they also pursued rights for gay
people they were one of the first
struggles to do so in the factories of
northern Italy and the government became
very threatened by the fact that
hundreds of thousands of people were
joining the leftist movements and so it
began to scratch that movement it
deployed fascist groups against them and
it’s suppressed the peaceful protests I
remember vividly when one man said to me
I went to a protest one day I was part
of the hundreds of thousands of people
on the streets and the police came with
their batons and I saw them beat my
friend’s head open in front of me and
his head exploded and at this point he
reached into a drawer beside him and he
took out a newspaper and on the front of
the newspaper was a picture of a man
lying in the streets with half his brain
next to him in the street and this was
his friend who’d been beaten to death
during the protest the man that told me
that story went on to form prima Linea
which was the second largest armed group
in the years of lead in Italy
we can perhaps empathize with some of
the dimensions of his story so the
context for these people becoming
involved in the armed struggle was the
70s and 80s where the state was
deploying fascist groups against them
and the Italian state used these fascist
groups to bomb banks to bomb trains and
abomb train stations in an attempt to
discredit the leftist movement to
associate them with this carnage and the
leftist movement knew exactly what the
state were doing so they picked up guns
to defend their struggle for hope they
didn’t want to see it fade and each
group then escalated with every other
group trying to get more members and
everyone I spoke to was jailed and most
of them were tortured as well if they’d
had a prominent role so in each case we
can understand why people become
involved in political violence we can
almost empathize with them sometimes
because they give you human reasons for
why they became involved but it is
difficult sometimes to have the moral
courage to listen to those reasons and
listen without without judging and kind
of instinctively pushing those reasons
away there is a very large elephant in
the room at this point which is Isis and
whether or not we can apply the same the
same calls for understanding call for
dialogue for a group like Isis who have
committed incredible atrocities in
recent years but I’m not able to answer
that question for you I think it’s
important to conclude this talk by
saying I’m not allowed to stand on this
stage and tell you that you should
listen to people’s reasons for joining
Isis I’m gonna loud to stand here and
say that we have to empathize with
people who might go and join them and
that is a societal issue whenever
society faces an armed conflict it’s too
difficult to ask why that armed conflict
is happening and to understand
instead we like to push it away we like
to look for for other reasons like
they’re they’re bad or they evil or
they’re crazy instead of listening but
for as long as we make it on
ethical or illegal to ask why people
join an armed struggle we make it
impossible to understand terrorism and
if we don’t understand it then we’re
forever condemned to repeat our mistakes
and to create more of it thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
good evening why do people commit
violent acts what motivates someone to
kill or injure another person this is a
question that has occupied philosophers
since the time of Aristotle or even
before iris tatl and a disclaimer before
we begin we will not be solving this
issue tonight
now terrorism is a topic we’re likely
all familiar with we live in an era too
often marred by terrorist attacks and we
live under more counterterrorism laws
than at any time in history before now
you’re sitting tonight in the
institution of learning yet this
university itself has to practice
counterterrorism all GP surgeries all
hospitals or schools and all
universities all have to practice
counterterrorism to prevent people
becoming involved in terrorist acts so
we’re all very familiar with this topic
whether aware of the legal details or
not but tonight I will help try to help
you see terrorism from a new perspective
not one looking at causes or prediction
but one of understanding the motivations
perhaps of people that get involved in
violent struggle so what do I mean by
this
for tonight’s talk I want to separate
understanding from prediction or causal
analysis or even preventative measures I
want to ask you to think about
understanding as something different
from those kinds of predictive causal
activity when you do a causal analysis
what you do is you have to abstract from
the situation in front of you to do a
causal analysis you have to create a
category a class of phenomenon which
involves basically creating a box and
fitting a very large array of actors and
events inside that one box and
abstracting from the detail of each of
them and the context of each of them so
you collect anti-colonial struggles you
collect
it’s lone wolves who tape automatic
weapons up a high-rise building in Las
Vegas you take Isis you take al-qaeda
and you put them all in the same box and
call it terrorism and when you’re
looking for the causes of terrorism you
generalize you abstract from what each
of these struggles was about and who
each of these people were and instead
you look for what they all hold in
common what is it that they hold in
common that if you took away well would
stop violence from happening is it
mental illness is it poverty is it
exclusion from society and in this type
of causal analysis is very unlikely that
you’d actually go and ask the person why
did you do this so in a causal analysis
you’re unlikely to use a talking
methodology you’re unlikely to actually
ask somebody why did you get involved in
this struggle why would you want to ask
them anyway I mean they’re unreliable
they could lie to you about why you
became involved in political violence
they might even not know the factors
that led them to become involved in
political violence these are all reasons
our causal analysis would give you for
not directly asking the person economic
and statistical methodologies they don’t
really care about the motivation of the
person how they felt before they got
involved in struggle or before they
committed a violent act motivation is is
irrelevant in these types of analyses
also if you have that general enormous
box where you’ve put all the different
actors inside you wouldn’t be able to
talk to every single one of them so why
would you use talking in the first place
but I don’t want to give you the wrong
impression there are some very good
causal analyses out there for example
Robert Pape did a study of every single
suicide bombing between 1980 and 2003
there were 315 if you’re interested
largely they were carried out by the
Marxist Tamil Tigers Association but
there were also some Islamist groups
some Sikh groups some Hindu groups etc
etc and what did he find well he found
that they all held something in common
and that is
an invasion every single case was
correlated with foreign occupation and
this was important because it caused the
use of terrorism as a strategic tactic
if you’ve been invaded by an occupying
force it’s very unlikely that you can
raise an army against that occupying
force you can’t use conventional methods
under a situation of occupation instead
you’ve got massive asymmetry between the
two sides so what do you do you evolve
strategically and suicide bombing
becomes a tactic that’s used more
frequently so is the problem solved do
we know what causes terrorism well I’m
guessing you’re likely not satisfied
with that explanation there’s nothing
wrong with that particular study it’s
just that as people we tend to want to
know the human reasons the motivations
for becoming involved in these type of
acts and that is not included in these
kind of studies if you want to
understand the motivation and the human
reasons for becoming involved in
political violence then you can’t have
that big box of samples that big box of
examples picking different struggles
from all over the world to understand
rather than to know and should try and
predict you have to throw away that box
and focus on one case in particular or
several but do it in depth if you want
to know any kind of answers to the
eternal question of violence why people
behave violently then you need to
understand their motivations and this
involves usually drinking quite a lot of
tea with them and talking to them it
also involves quite a lot of moral
courage so what I’m asking you to do on
this journey with me tonight is to not
instantly bulk at the suggestion that we
might be able to empathize with
terrorists we are trained to do that we
are trained to be very uncomfortable
with feeling any kind of empathy for a
violent person societies have to develop
that way a society develops around
cooperation and has to externalize
violent actors so you may feel
uncomfortable at certain points when I
ask you to listen to the voice of the
terrorists
listening doesn’t necessarily mean
excusing or agreeing it just means there
might be a purpose to listening so you
can retain the ability to disagree with
their actions while you listen to their
stories how are we going to do this how
are we going to talk to people involved
in political violence well we’ve got
some significant access problems I’ll
give you that we can’t exactly decamp to
rocket to go and stand with a microphone
in the streets and try and the interview
Isis it’s too dangerous
also the university would never ever
give any of us research permission to go
out there and do anything however what
we can do is we can speak to historical
militants those who’ve already been
through the prison system and come out
the other side or those who one their
struggles and overturn the state in
question and are now the new leaders
this is what I did for my PhD I went to
Italy to interview ex militants from
what’s called the years of lead which
was in the 70s and the 80s and it’s
called the years of lead because so many
shell casings were supposedly left on
the streets I also went to Cyprus to
interview a ouka who were an anti
colonial insurgency against the British
Empire in the 1950s a ocher in
particular were very elderly by the time
I went to speak to them they’d not ever
been to jail because they won their
struggle they managed to remove the
British Empire from their islands this
wasn’t because they were highly skilled
it was largely quite have put together
with nuts and bolts kind of insurgency
but it was the era of decolonization
where lots of these struggles broke out
across the world and the Empire was
looking and trying to stop them all
simultaneously so what happens when you
go out and you talk to people that have
been involved in political violence and
you ask them their stories enormous
amount of tea an enormous amount of
coffee these stories sometimes go on for
three or four hours so you get very
highly caffeinated by the end of them
soompi
all are still to this day absolutely
stunned that their lives took this turn
and that they ended up smuggling
explosives into a port taking it onto a
ship planting it and managing to get out
again before they sunk the ship by
blowing up the bomb other people are
completely shocked and visibly shocked
that their lives took them down this
path that they shot someone and
assassinated them in the streets of
Italy other people aren’t shocked at all
other people are not ethically
problematizing what they did and don’t
seem to bear any kind of trauma or scars
everybody is different but in each case
people gave human reasons for why they
got involved in violent violent struggle
think about the conditions which might
provoke you to join an armed struggle
and likely you’ll come up with some of
the same reasons that these interviewees
gave to me don’t imagine killing
civilians right now that’s quite a leap
along the path but imagine fighting an
occupying force a tyrant has invaded
your country you’ve tried peaceful
struggle you’ve tried it for decades
decades decades and it hasn’t worked
what if conditions were getting worse
these are the kinds of stories that were
told to me by x-fighters of these
organizations in Cyprus they’d tried
peaceful methods for 70 years before the
insurgency broke out they tried
referendums where over 95% of the
population voted for democracy and
national freedom to remove the Empire
from the island they tried peaceful
protests all through the streets of the
capital and of course nothing worked and
then world war 2 came and the British
Empire needed its colonial subjects to
make up the numbers in fighting against
the Axis powers so they came to Cyprus
with an offer we will give you your
freedom you’ve been asking for it for a
long time we’ll give you your liberation
if you help us fight against the Axis
powers and the Cypriots took the deal
they went and fought on the front lines
came back and as we all know that
promise was betrayed that’s the point
where the story turns towards a national
struggle involving insurgency
the church in Cyprus began to very
vocally support the cause for liberation
and the Greek general General Grievous
arrived on a ship to Cyprus and began to
organize the insurgency with the local
fighters
how do people explain this well they
explained it seeing a chance for freedom
that they’ve been waiting for their
whole lives that even their parents and
grandparents have been waiting for and
they saw their friends joining up so why
wouldn’t they
they narrated themselves as heroes but I
want to emphasize that they are also
responsible for the division of Cyprus
in the years afterwards they may have
fought for freedom and they may have
removed the Empire from their islands
but they later suppress the Turkish
minority with such brutality that Turkey
itself invaded Cyprus and the island
remained split to this day Nicosia is
actually the last divided capital in
Europe it reminds me of a story that I
heard from a man named Uranus who
narrated himself as the perfect heroic
fighter for freedom all he ever wanted
to do was fight for the democracy in his
country and freedom from the air patrol
and they’ve taken two soldiers hostage
and these soldiers were making too much
noise and they were frightened that they
would be discovered by the other groups
of soldiers in the nearby area and so
they knew that they had to kill them and
Yanis was visibly upset by this memory
because he remembers them being
teenagers he said to me we were shocked
the Empire had sent teenagers to fight
us and he was visibly upset when he
explained what happens when you prepare
somebody for their own death especially
when they’re teenagers
or they cry for their mother this is why
awareness has to narrate himself as a
hero he has to live with that memory of
what he’s done he has to stick to that
narrative of it all being for a greater
cause for a greater good but we don’t
necessarily have to agree with his
actions while we empathize with how he
tells his story
in Italy X militants also gave very
human reasons very human stories for how
they became involved in the militant
groups of the years of lead like Cyprus
they’d spent a long time deploying
peaceful protests to try and improve
conditions in Italy in their 60s and 70s
Italy at this time was on the border of
the Soviet Union and the capitalist
Western states it had the largest
Communist Party for decades by this time
it had even won an election after World
War two until the CIA into the end of
recounted the votes so that the
Communist Party didn’t win so they tried
everything to to pursue their goals
peacefully as one person said to me the
movements didn’t wake up one day wanting
to be violence they didn’t wake up
finding automatic weapons under the bed
this had a very long historical and
social build-up it began as a movement
for hope these leftist organizations
they tried to attain housing rights for
people because there were no housing
rights for people in those days they
pursued women’s rights in a conservative
country they also pursued rights for gay
people they were one of the first
struggles to do so in the factories of
northern Italy and the government became
very threatened by the fact that
hundreds of thousands of people were
joining the leftist movements and so it
began to scratch that movement it
deployed fascist groups against them and
it’s suppressed the peaceful protests I
remember vividly when one man said to me
I went to a protest one day I was part
of the hundreds of thousands of people
on the streets and the police came with
their batons and I saw them beat my
friend’s head open in front of me and
his head exploded and at this point he
reached into a drawer beside him and he
took out a newspaper and on the front of
the newspaper was a picture of a man
lying in the streets with half his brain
next to him in the street and this was
his friend who’d been beaten to death
during the protest the man that told me
that story went on to form prima Linea
which was the second largest armed group
in the years of lead in Italy
we can perhaps empathize with some of
the dimensions of his story so the
context for these people becoming
involved in the armed struggle was the
70s and 80s where the state was
deploying fascist groups against them
and the Italian state used these fascist
groups to bomb banks to bomb trains and
abomb train stations in an attempt to
discredit the leftist movement to
associate them with this carnage and the
leftist movement knew exactly what the
state were doing so they picked up guns
to defend their struggle for hope they
didn’t want to see it fade and each
group then escalated with every other
group trying to get more members and
everyone I spoke to was jailed and most
of them were tortured as well if they’d
had a prominent role so in each case we
can understand why people become
involved in political violence we can
almost empathize with them sometimes
because they give you human reasons for
why they became involved but it is
difficult sometimes to have the moral
courage to listen to those reasons and
listen without without judging and kind
of instinctively pushing those reasons
away there is a very large elephant in
the room at this point which is Isis and
whether or not we can apply the same the
same calls for understanding call for
dialogue for a group like Isis who have
committed incredible atrocities in
recent years but I’m not able to answer
that question for you I think it’s
important to conclude this talk by
saying I’m not allowed to stand on this
stage and tell you that you should
listen to people’s reasons for joining
Isis I’m gonna loud to stand here and
say that we have to empathize with
people who might go and join them and
that is a societal issue whenever
society faces an armed conflict it’s too
difficult to ask why that armed conflict
is happening and to understand
instead we like to push it away we like
to look for for other reasons like
they’re they’re bad or they evil or
they’re crazy instead of listening but
for as long as we make it on
ethical or illegal to ask why people
join an armed struggle we make it
impossible to understand terrorism and
if we don’t understand it then we’re
forever condemned to repeat our mistakes
and to create more of it thank you
[Applause]
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