Najeh Ibrahim) take up arms, while others who live under the same conditions (like Saif al-Islam) conduct nonviolent activities instead?
This book is dedicated to investigating this question. Focusing on the individuals who take up arms, this question explores areas that may have been overlooked by the large body of literature on violent groups. Specifically, focusing on groups cannot explain why certain individuals but not others form or join violent groups, carry out particular attacks, or sometimes break away from their groups.
The central argument in my investigation of this question is that, contrary to widespread assumptions, both violent and nonviolent individuals act in response to the belief that the state is aggressive. Unlike what is widely believed, I also find that violent individuals do not act in response to beliefs in Islam. Instead, I argue that the motivations of violent and nonviolent individuals are surprisingly similar, and that there are no significant differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. Specifically, my analysis identifies ten mechanisms related to decisions to take up arms (five mechanisms) and to engage in nonviolent activism (five mechanisms).
These mechanisms show that the belief that the state is aggressive is so significant that individuals who hold it may decide to take up arms even if they also believe the state is stronger than they are, and that they will suffer severe consequences from engaging in violence. They also show that the belief that the state is aggressive may encourage individuals to decide to engage in nonviolent activism, even though they do not believe their activity is going to have any effect on state aggression. The analysis furthermore investigates when the individuals would not have decided to take up arms or to engage in nonviolent activism. This counterfactual analysis shows that in the absence of beliefs about threatening state behavior, no individuals would have decided to take up arms, and significantly fewer individuals would have decided to engage in nonviolent activism. By contrast, absence of beliefs about Islam would not have changed the individuals’ decisions. The analysis also shows that nonviolent individuals may be motivated by the belief that there is economic deprivation in their direct environment—a motivation that is usually attributed to violent individuals.
These findings have implications for our understanding of violent individuals by showing that rather than being crazy religious fanatics, violent individuals are not that different from nonviolent individuals and engage in very similar reasoning processes to those underlying mainstream political behavior. They also put in perspective existing explanations by suggesting that political violence is not a consequence of Islam, economic deprivation, or access to violent groups.
To develop this argument, this book draws on political psychology literature and adopts a cognitive mapping approach (CMA) (Axelrod 1976). To my knowledge, this is the first study that adopts this approach to study violent individuals. Cognitive mapping explores the belief systems underlying human behavior, such as violent and nonviolent activism. In this way, it bridges the gap between actors and structures and adds to theories that focus on external factors, which cannot by themselves explain why people engage in certain behavior. Moreover, cognitive mapping allows the systematic exploration of various types of factors underlying behavior—modeled as beliefs—as well as the study of the mechanisms by which these factors are connected with behavior—modeled as systems of beliefs. In this way, the CMA synthesizes factors that are usually addressed by different theories, and it goes beyond analyses that focus on direct relations between particular variables and behavior, rather than on the microlevel mechanisms underlying this behavior.
Taking the actors’ own explanations as the starting point of the analysis, the CMA provides rich inside knowledge into behavior, which cannot be obtained from other methods that involve external research categories. Cognitive maps do not a priori consider certain factors at the expense of others; instead, they cover a large range of factors that the actors themselves consider relevant. These inside factors, which offer a rigorous basis for a bottom-up analysis of human behavior, can then be analyzed by the researcher.
Cognitive maps are usually highly complex and difficult to analyze: typically, they consist of dozens of beliefs and connections between beliefs, which are related to decisions for action. Because of this complexity, it is not obvious how to systematically analyze such maps, and most political scientists have abandoned the approach—even though cognitive mapping used to be considered a “valuable tool” that “has been used successfully” (Young 1996: 395).
This book reintroduces the CMA to studies of political science by presenting new possibilities for research with cognitive maps. To cope with the complexity of cognitive maps, I present a computer program I developed with Nick Henderson from the Institute of Mathematical and Computational Engineering at Stanford University. The program is nonstatistical and enables the researcher to systematically study the connections between beliefs and decisions. Specifically, it enables the researcher to (1) systematically identify beliefs connected to decisions to take up arms or engage in nonviolent activism; (2) systematically trace belief chains connected to these decisions; and (3) explore counterfactuals, which show under what conditions individuals would not have decided to take up arms or engage in nonviolent activism. The program is applied to cognitive maps that involve trillions of combinations of beliefs.
To construct cognitive maps, this book applies qualitative methods. Specifically, I conducted ethnographic interviews with formerly violent and nonviolent individuals, and employed James Spradley’s theme analysis (1979) to develop a coding scheme that abstracts the beliefs of different individuals into comparable categories. In this way, this book contributes in-depth knowledge about political violence. It also contributes one of the few studies constructing cognitive maps from ethnographic interviews, which present new information that is very difficult to gather. Based on this information, it provides rich insight that both complements and serves as a check on the large body of literature on political violence that focuses on macrolevel factors without engaging with the actors’ own explanations. As I discuss below, the findings obtained from the analysis put into perspective much of the existing research in political violence.
The research design is a double-paired comparison that includes important control groups that remain absent from most existing studies: violent and nonviolent individuals, as well as Muslims and non-Muslims. To investigate these individuals, this study focuses on two countries, Egypt and Germany. Egypt is an authoritarian state located in the Middle East—a region with a long history of political violence. Over the past decades, Egypt has experienced numerous acts of violence, and Egyptians continue to play an important role in violent groups abroad (for example, the current leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is an Egyptian). A hub of political activism, Egypt is moreover the home of the Muslim Brotherhood—the largest opposition movement in the Middle East and one of the most influential Muslim movements in the world. Most of the individuals who participated in violent and nonviolent activism in Egypt have been Muslim, which indicates that Islam plays an important role in the country. Egypt has a population with a large Muslim majority and a long history of Islamic thought. It has been the home of numerous influential Muslim thinkers (Ibn Khaldun and Muhammad Rashid Rida, for instance, died there), and it houses the greatest authority in Sunni Islam, al-Azhar University. As the most populous state in its region, Egypt also plays a major role in Arab politics. It houses the Arab League and has frequently led talks between Arab states, or between Israel and its neighbors. Finally, Egypt is a rather poor state. In 2013, it ranked number 110 of 187 countries and territories in the UNDP Human Development Index. It has high rates of unemployment and illiteracy.
By contrast, Germany is a democratic state. Since its system was designed very carefully after the fall of the Nazis, it is known as a model of a modern democracy. As the largest economy in Europe, it has played an important role in regional politics, and its people enjoy one of the highest living standards in the world. Nevertheless, Germany has also experienced political violence, and it has been a major setting of political activism in Europe. Unlike their Egyptian counterparts, the individuals who participated in these activities were not Muslim and did not try to introduce an
