In the last 24 hours many prominent politicians and pundits have said that they don’t want Syrian refugees to enter the United States. For example, Gov. Chris Christie has said that he doesn’t even want 5-year-old Syrian orphans to come into the country. Almost half of the country’s governors have said that they will refuse to allow Syrian refugees to come to their states. The same pattern applies in Europe where, for example, members of the new Polish government are threatening to break European law by turning away refugees.
Many of these people claim that they don’t want to admit refugees because they fear some of them will commit violent terrorist crimes, like those that just took place in Paris.
Yet there’s a different group of people which also appears to be highly prone to violent extremism, which isn’t getting nearly as much attention. In aforthcoming book published by Princeton University Press, Diego Gambetta, a renowned sociologist at the European University Institute in Italy, and Steffen Hertog, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, provide a new theory for why it is that engineers seem unusually prone to become involved in terrorist organizations. The following post is based on their earlier article for the European Journal of Sociology.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.