Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog’s new book, “Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education,” examines why a disproportionate number of Islamist terrorists and other right wing extremists appear to have studied engineering. I interviewed them over email about their new book.
HF – The book’s major finding is that Islamist terrorists are much more likely to have a background in engineering than the conventional wisdom might predict. Why are you sure that this isn’t just because terrorist organizations want to recruit people with technical skills, or because recruitment is shaped by personal networks (so that e.g. initially recruiting an engineer may lead to recruiting his or her friends and so on)?
DG & SH – We find that engineers are no more likely than other graduates to cover technical roles, such as bomb making or communications: 15 percent of the ones whose role in radical groups we could identify were bomb-makers. What engineers learn at university is unlikely to make them more practically proficient at bomb making than former military or car mechanics. Let’s not forget that many non-Islamist extremist groups have been skillful at bomb making without engineers in their ranks.
As for personal networks, we find that the over-representation of engineers occurs in virtually all countries of origins of the jihadists and all extremist groups. This is just too way many independent networks – most of which emerged with no direct connection with each other in a pre-Internet era – to be an accident due to the random appearance of a ‘mutant’ engineer followed by the selective recruitment of his trusted friends and colleagues. Often anomalies are a fluke, but sometimes, as in this case, they can be small windows into a difficult phenomenon to explain that reveal hitherto unexplored landscapes.
HF – You find an interesting pattern in the Islamic world, where engineers in countries like Egypt are more likely than people with other professions to turn to terrorism. However, Saudi Arabia is the big exception. Why are engineers more likely to turn to violence in most countries, and why not in Saudi Arabia?
DG & SH – We find that in the Islamic world, engineers and – to a lesser extent – doctors show up in disproportionate numbers among radical groups at times when the economy turns sour. Engineering and medicine are universally the most demanding degrees in Islamic countries and attract the brightest and most ambitious students. When these don’t find the individual and collective opportunities they have been hoping for, they experience particularly severe frustration and are at higher risk of radicalization.
This “relative deprivation” story is confirmed by case literature on Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and also by the fact that engineers are not over-represented among extremists in Saudi Arabia – the one Arab country in our sample where engineers have consistently enjoyed good labor market opportunities. In that country, Islamic studies graduates constitute the main contingent of radical graduates, and these indeed have very dim labor market prospects in the kingdom. We hence show that it’s not poverty but the frustration of would-be elites that leads to extremism, particularly in countries that have rapidly expanded their university systems without commensurate economic development.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.