University Times

John Horgan

In-depth research on what motivates membership in terrorist organizations is needed, an expert on terrorism said in a March 28 international security lecture on campus.

John Horgan, a Penn State psychology professor and director of its International Center for the Study of Terrorism, recently embarked on a study, “Pathways, Processes, Roles and Factors Related to Terrorist Disengagement, Re-engagement and Recidivism,” in conjunction with political scientists and psychologists from Penn State and collaborators at the University of East London and the University of St. Andrews.

The three-year project focuses on how and why people decide to leave terrorist organizations, voluntarily or otherwise. The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate is funding the research.

The study has three major components, Horgan said. One part is a comprehensive review of accounts of disengagement from all kinds of organizations, including how and why people leave firms, gangs and other groups.

The research team also is analyzing 105 autobiographical accounts of people who have been involved in terrorism. Horgan acknowledged the limitations associated with this sort of material, noting that “terrorist autobiographies, just like most autobiographies, tend to be quite self-serving” and must be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

The third component involves interviewing 30 recently disengaged terrorists from a variety of active movements including religious groups — both extreme right-wing and left-wing.

“This, for me, is the big question: How can terrorist behavior be managed? I think we’ve gone way beyond the point of talking about prevention and eradication,” Horgan said.

Management includes preventing people from becoming involved in terrorist groups, disrupting activities of those already involved and facilitating disengagement of those who want to get out, he said.

His earlier work on terrorist disengagement found — surprisingly, he said — “that terrorist groups are full of people who are deeply disillusioned. Not only deeply disillusioned in the sense that that’s why they became terrorists: They’re disillusioned with the reality of what it’s like to be involved in one of these groups.”

The obvious follow-up question is: Why don’t they leave?

“That’s where the stories start getting really, really interesting,” Horgan said. He’s found that most remain involved because they feel they have no way out or that their exit would come at a significant cost.

Horgan said the idea behind the research came to him after a judge contacted him in search of empirical evidence to help him decide sentences for two individuals: one who had made bombs, the other who was more of a low-level hanger-on. There was no such research on which of the terrorists might be the more dangerous.

A better understanding of why people leave is needed. “We are finding more and more evidence that not everyone who is involved in terrorist activity is necessarily a radical,” he said.

“We see people leave terrorist groups all the time, but they come back,” he said. “Sometimes they come back in the same role or function they had before they left; other times they come back and do something completely different.”

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Much is known about how, why and when terrorism ends, mostly from examining terrorism at the organizational level, rather than from individual perspectives. “Most groups fade away on their own,” Horgan said, noting 80 percent don’t last beyond 18 months. For individuals, a key issue is to understand the meaning of involvement for that individual. “There are lots of roles and functions. Involvement doesn’t mean the same thing for every person,” he said.

“Just because you become involved in a group doesn’t necessarily mean you do nasty things,” Horgan said, noting there are many roles and functions members of such organizations can engage in.

Many recruits join not because they want to be part of the group but because there is something specific they want to do, he said.

Horgan noted that there is a confused relationship between disengagement and de-radicalization. “You can disengage from a terrorist group without necessarily being de-radicalized. People come and go all the time; it doesn’t necessarily mean you change your views.”

He said, “There is an urgent need for independent evaluation of this kind of evidence — psychologists, criminologists and psychiatrists make risk assessments of offenders all the time,” he said. “We’ve gotten it down to a pretty good science when it comes to sex offenders, for example. You know what the risks are; you know what things individual offenders do to talk the talk and you know what they say to try to fool psychologists to try to get lenient probation and judgments,” Horgan said. “We have nothing — absolutely zero knowledge — when it comes to what are the relevant issues for terrorist prisoners. Forget about detainees, I’m talking about people who are convicted for sure and it’s certain they were involved in terrorism.

“There is no knowledge, no empirical evidence whatsoever underpinning the judgments on whether or not a convicted terrorist should be released,” he said.

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Sometimes people make a clear-cut exit. More often, Horgan said, participants tend to move gradually from one role to another.

Horgan said he has found disengagement is a complex dynamic process — as complex as why people get involved in the first place. Multiple factors contribute. “Don’t underestimate chance,” Horgan said. “A lot was being at the right place at the right time,” he said.

One factor that was unexpected in his studies was that a major reason for leaving was disillusionment “stemming from a mismatch between the reasons they had for wanting to become involved and their experiences in the group.”

Some were disillusioned with the leaders, the conditions or the fact that it was not as easy as they’d thought to kill people. Horgan said it’s a myth that terrorists don’t experience guilt. “They do. And they have a hard time dealing with it,” he said. “They find ways to alleviate it.” Some turn to ideology, others to individuals, he said.

Ariel Merari, an Israeli psychologist who studies terrorists, said the academic community can make terrorism better known. “Describe it well,” Horgan said. “We seem to be in a terrible rush to explain terrorism before we even describe it. I think we’re still struggling with that,” he said. “The reason that terrorism studies gets such a bad rap is because 90 percent of it is crap, rubbish. But there are ways to systematically and rigorously do this kind of research.”

“There is a role for repentant former terrorists,” Horgan said. “The reason that disengaged individuals often have a price on their head isn’t always because they become informers, but because there’s enormous potential for them to prevent other people from becoming involved,” he said. “Some of the most effective disengagement programs are the ones you haven’t heard of. … They’re being run by people who have left these organizations, who have a tremendous amount of blood and guilt on their hands, but they are preventing kids on a daily basis from joining.”

—Kimberly K. Barlow