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1. Building Community Resilience to Violent Extremism

Author:
Stevan Weine
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Institution:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Abstract:
The Obama administration's landmark new approach to countering violent extremism through engaging community partners calls for no less than a paradigm shift in how we understand the causes of terrorism. The shift is away from a pathways approach focused on how push and pull factors influenced one person's trajectory toward or away from violent extremism, and towards an ecological view that looks at how characteristics of the social environment can either lead to or diminish involvement in violent extremism for the persons living there. The core idea of this new paradigm, conveyed in the White House's December 2011 Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States (SIP), is that of countering violent extremism through building resilience. Denis McDonough, former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama, expressed this at an Islamic center in Virginia, stating, “we know, as the President said, that the best defense against terrorist ideologies is strong and resilient individuals and communities.” Subsequent White House documents have further unpacked this, for example, in stating: “[n]ational security draws on the strength and resilience of our citizens, communities, and economy.” Resilience usually refers to persons' capacities to withstand or bounce back from adversity. It is a concept derived from engineering perspectives upon the durability of materials to bend and not break. In recent years, resilience has come to the forefront in the fields of public health, child development, and disaster relief. To scientists and policymakers, resilience is not just a property of individuals, but of families, communities, organizations, networks, and societies. Resilience-focused policies and interventions that support or enhance its components have yielded significant and cost effective gains in preventing HIV/AIDS transmission, and helping high-risk children and disaster-impacted populations. Though the present use of resilience sounds more like resistance, today's hope is that such approaches could also keep young Americans away from violent extremism. A resilience approach offers no quick fix, not in any of the aforementioned fields or in countering violent extremism. It depends upon adequately understanding what resilience means for a particular group of persons and how it has been shaped by history, politics, social context, and culture. It also depends upon government establishing and sustaining partnerships with the impacted families, communities, networks, and organizations. Additionally, it depends on government working in partnership to design, implement, and evaluate what interventions can really make a difference in building resilience, a process certain to involve trial and error
Topic:
Security and Islam
Political Geography:
United States

2. Understanding Iran

Author:
John McNeil
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Institution:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Abstract:
William Polk, born in 1929, is one of the more successful scholar-diplomats in American life. He has written more than a dozen books, mainly on the modern Arab world, some for trade publishers and some for university presses. He taught Middle East and Islamic history at Harvard and the University of Chicago. He also served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, on the State Department's Policy Planning staff and later as an adviser to McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson's National Security Adviser, charged with handling the aftermath of 1967's Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. His latest book is his first on Iran. He has visited the country from time to time since 1956, and in the 1960s met the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and some of the Iranian political elite. Aware of the stalemate that bedevils U.S.-Iranian relations, and frustrated by what he sees as the narrowness of war-game exercises and the field of international relations, Polk wrote this book “to bring forward what war games omit: in short, what it means when we speak of Iran and Iranians.” He feels American policy-makers pay insufficient heed to the history and culture of Iran and Iranians, and are thereby baffled by what seems to them illogical behavior. If they had adequate grounding in things Iranian, he believes, they would better understand Iran, its government, its policies, and its people. Adequate grounding, in Polk's view, extends back 2,500 years. He maintains that even if the majority of Iranians alive have scant knowledge of the Achaemenid dynasty they are nonetheless influenced by it. Indeed, he writes, “I am certain that the inhabitants of Iran today are largely governed by their past regardless of whether they consciously remember it.” He appeals to Carl Jung's notion of “collective unconscious” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “social contract” to make his case.
Topic:
Islam
Political Geography:
America, Iran, Middle East, Israel, and Chicago

3. The Arab Digital Vanguard: How a Decade of Blogging Contributed to a Year of Revolution

Author:
Jillian York
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Institution:
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Abstract:
In 1991, just four years after Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali rose to power as president, Tunisia became the first country in the Arab world to connect to the Internet. The public had access by 1996, though its vast democratizing benefits were to be short-lived. That same year, the L'Agence Tunisienne d'Internet (Tunisian Internet Agency, or ATI) was established. Among its first mandates was the introduction of censorship. Over the course of the next decade the region began to trickle online, with Saudi Arabia and Syria amongst the last to connect. Swept up by the global technology bubble, in Cairo and Beirut, Amman and Abu Dhabi, entrepreneurs, seeing the communicative potential of the pre-Web 2.0 Internet, began developing email services, job-search sites, and perhaps most importantly, web forums. Such forums became sources of unreported news, discussion, social commentary, and political debate, paving the way for the region's future bloggers. In countries where political discussion was taboo and crossing red lines—such as discussion of the ruling family, or debates about Islam—resulted in persecution of journalists, web forums created new spaces, outside of society, where political discussion was relatively safe…
Topic:
Islam
Political Geography:
Saudi Arabia and Syria