Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

perceived disrespect and loss of significance drive extremism more than poverty does

Properties2
tagsja-picks, question, xref, define, factual_claims, trade, corroborated, category/factual-claims
aliases@brown_violent_2022, loc. 157, @brown_violent_2022, loc. 159

5 min read

perceived disrespect and loss of significance drive extremism more than poverty does

Evidence

International research on the topic of poverty is also insightful. Krueger and Malečková famously documented no relationship between poverty and education and Palestinian support for attacks against Israel (Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Malečková, “Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 17, No. 4, 2003). More recently, Dawson and Amarasingam found in their conversations with Western recruits for ISIS that socioeconomic factors played little role in their radicalization (Lorne L. Dawson and Amarnath Amarasingam, “Talking to Foreign Fighters: Insights into the Motivations for Hijrah to Syria and Iraq,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2017). An ethnographic study of Dutch foreign fighters, though, suggested that such factors were important (Daan Weggemanns, Edwin Bakker, and Peter Grol, “Who Are They and Why Do They Go? The Radicalisation and Preparatory Processes of Dutch Jihadist Foreign Fighters,” Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2014). A recently published systematic scoping review of the radicalization literature identified unemployment as an important push factor for extremism (Matteo Vergani, Muhammad Iqbal, Ekin Ilbahar, and Greg Barton, “The Three Ps of Radicalization: Push, Pull and Personal; A Systematic Scoping Review of the Scientific Evidence About Radicalization into Violent Extremism,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 43, No. 10, 2020). Finally, a meta-analysis of risk factors for radicalization found that unemployment ranked only as one of the “smallest” effects on risk (Michael Wolfowicz, Yael Litmanovitz, David Weisburd, and Badi Hasisi, “A Field-Wide Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Putative Risk and Protective Factors for Radicalization Outcomes,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 36, 2020). … When people perceive themselves as rejected, divested of control, or as victims of injustice, they feel belittled and disrespected; consequently, they are motivated to restore their sense of self-worth and meaning. According to the significance quest theory … the need for personal significance makes the occurrence of extreme behavior more likely. Propelled by such needs, people should be more likely to fully commit to important goals and to suppress other concerns because the former are especially well-suited to restoring their sense of meaning and personal significance. … The research team involved in that study conducted logistic regression analysis to determine which specific aspects of loss of significance, if any, were correlated with violent behavior and found that “most of the indicators of loss of significance were positively related to the probability of political violence. At the bivariate level when individuals experienced failure at work, when they were rejected in social relationships, or when they were victims of abuse, they were more likely to resort to violence to pursue their ideological goals.” — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America, 157

When people perceive themselves as rejected, divested of control, or as victims of injustice, they feel belittled and disrespected; consequently, they are motivated to restore their sense of self-worth and meaning. According to the significance quest theory … the need for personal significance makes the occurrence of extreme behavior more likely. Propelled by such needs, people should be more likely to fully commit to important goals and to suppress other concerns because the former are especially well-suited to restoring their sense of meaning and personal significance. — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America, 159

Categorization

  • QUESTION: The Dutch foreign-fighters study contradicting Dawson and Amarasingam on socioeconomic factors — worth chasing to see which holds across samples.
  • XREF: Significance quest theory connects to this reader’s hypothesis testing: insults and loss of status, not material deprivation, mark the entry into adversarial identity. — connects to: Self-esteem needs predict extremism only through collective, not personal, mechanisms — Lea Echelmeyer, Anne-Marie Slotboom, and Frank Weerman, The Putative Effect of Identity on…, 240; Cultural alienation and marginalization predict extremism across both minority and majority groups. — Lea Echelmeyer, Anne-Marie Slotboom, and Frank Weerman, The Putative Effect of Identity on…, 219; Group-based relative deprivation explains extremism endorsement among Western-born Muslims — Lea Echelmeyer, Anne-Marie Slotboom, and Frank Weerman, The Putative Effect of Identity on…, 267 (+3 more)
  • DEFINE: Significance quest theory is defined here — useful for the reader’s framework for analyzing what changed interviewees’ identities.
  • corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 157; Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 159

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks