Turning to Political Violence: The Emergence of Terrorism

518 Pages·2017·3.95 MB·English

by  Marc Sageman

Turning to Political Violence
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Turning to Political Violence
The Emergence of Terrorism
Marc Sageman
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2017 Marc Sageman

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly
citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Sageman, Marc, author.
Title: Turning to political violence : the emergence of terrorism / Marc Sageman.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017010333 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4877-7 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Political violence—History. | Radicalization—History. | Terrorism—
History. | Terrorists—Psychology—History.
Classification: LCC JC328.6 .S24 2017 | DDC 363.32509—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010333
For Jody and Joseph
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C o n t e n t s
Preface ix
1. A Model of the Turn to Political Violence 1
2. The French Revolution and the Emergence of Modern
Political Violence 48
3. Political Violence from the Restoration to the
Paris Commune 109
4. The Professionalization of Terroristic Violence in Russia 152
5. Anarchism and the Expansion of Political Violence 224
6. The Specialized Terrorist Organization:
The PSR Combat Unit 1902–1908 263
7. Banditry, the End of a World, and Indiscriminate
Political Violence 316
8. Policy Implications 361
Appendix. Testing the Social Identity Perspective Model
of the Turn to Political Violence 377
Notes 385
Bibliography 437
Index 469
Acknowledgments 495
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P r e f a c e
On April 15, 2013, at the end of the Boston Marathon, two bombs exploded in
the crowd of spectators, killing 3 people and injuring more than 250 others.
Within a few days, the perpetrators were identified as two brothers, Tamerlan
and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who were Chechen refugees. Tamerlan, the older
one, was killed in the ensuing police dragnet, but Dzhokhar survived despite
being wounded multiple times. By all accounts, he seemed to be a well-
assimilated and sociable young man, attending college and smoking mari-
juana with his friends.
Shortly after the bombing, my usually silent phone started ringing off the
hook. Journalists called to ask the same question: how could an apparently
normal young man like Dzhokhar do this, seemingly out of the blue? I was
just emerging from a long involvement with the U.S. intelligence community,
during which I was banned from speaking with journalists. Although now
free to talk to them, I was still at a loss to provide a short and pithy answer.
Despite spending over a decade straddling government and academia work-
ing on terrorism issues, I still did not entirely understand what leads a person
to turn to political violence. How does one start to make sense of this senseless
violence? Do these individuals have something psychologically wrong with
them, as many people believe? Are they victims of a mysterious process of
brainwashing or indoctrination, as many others believe? More fundamentally,
how does one conceptualize terrorism, terrorists, and the process by which a
very few people become terrorists? I concluded that only with a radical change
of perspective could scholars hope to answer these questions.
What leads people to turn to political violence? This haunting question
has obsessed me ever since the tragedy of 9/11. This book originated as a short
historical introduction to a book on the current wave of global neojihadi1 at-
tacks against the West. However, this attempt to contextualize this current
wave of terrorism proved far more complicated as I dug deeper into each his-
torical case. Parallel to this revelation were developments in various academic
x Preface
disciplines, changes in the political climate, and not least, insights gained
through actual encounters with politically violent people.
The political climate since 11 September 2001 has changed. In the decade
following 9/11, the anticipated onslaught of terroristic violence in the United
States did not materialize. This allowed some scholars to step back and take
some distance from the devastation of that day. Alarmist voices among self-
promoting experts no longer rang true when faced with the paucity of actual
global neojihadi attacks in this country. I was privileged to examine the evi-
dence for many of the government claims from the inside and was struck by
the lack of substance behind many of them. I also investigated many alleged
instances of political violence, including interviews with alleged perpetrators,
and realized that many of the claims were somewhat overblown. This does not
mean that there is no threat, but overall the risk is quite small, especially when
compared with fatalities from accidents and other forms of human violence in
this country.
At the same time, there were many developments in academic fields that
have always been a source of inspiration for my work. New scholarship on the
perpetrators of the Holocaust and violence during the French Revolution
challenged many of my fundamental assumptions about political violence.
These studies focused on how political actors conceived of and understood
themselves and their actions at the time they committed their acts. New devel-
opments in cognitive and social psychology, especially in the social identity
perspective, have reinterpreted classical experimental evidence that had de-
fied interpretation. These research findings have direct relevance on political
violence, and I have incorporated them into this work.
My interviews with perpetrators of political violence and review of tran-
scripts of interviews of others made me aware of the importance they at-
tributed to government action against them in their explanations of their
actions. Political violence necessarily involves contested narratives, and per-
petrators defined themselves in contrast to governmental agents and their ac-
tions, which gave meaning to their violence in the context of a conflict between
them and the state. They viewed their actions as response to state aggression.
In their minds, their violence could not be understood outside this escalating
conflict. Indeed, as some scholars have previously pointed out, much political
violence involves competition with the state, in a cycle of escalation culminat-
ing in ever-i ncreasing violence. Like a boxing match, it is impossible to under-
stand a fight without looking at both combatants: the actions of each are the
context to which the other reacts. To understand the violent effects of any con-
flict requires an examination of both belligerent parties.
This raises the sensitive issue of the state’s potential contribution to non-
state political violence. Because funding for terrorism research comes exclu-