Engineers of Jihad

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Engineers of Jihad. Orange jumpsuits

"‘The startling finding is really the surprisingly high number of engineers who feature among Islamic radicals in the Muslim as well as in the non Muslim world’...

‘There's a share about 45% of engineers among people with a higher education degree whose degree we know, both in the Muslim world and among Islamic radicals in the West. And that is independent of the general levels of education, because in the West Islamic radicals or Islamist radicals tend to be less educated, they tend to have more problematic educational and professional biographies. They tend to be more educated in the Islamic world, but independent of that, as soon as you have a degree, the likelihood that you're an engineer is quite high, is much higher than in the general population of graduates.’...

‘One might think that okay, well, I'm gonna explain this because they are recruited because of their technical skills, perhaps their bomb making skills.’

‘Yeah, that is obviously the kind of knee jerk reaction that we got... we’re ruling out that explanation through a number of arguments and a number of data points. One is that if you look at the functions of people within those groups, which, which we've managed to do for a subsample of members of those radical groups, then you find that engineers are not any more likely than people with any other degree to actually engage in bomb making. So 15% of them are classified as bomb makers in our sample and that’s exactly the same share for others’…

‘We argued that for the Muslim world radicals that we look at, we have a classical case of relative deprivation, where people have quite high expectations that are then frustrated in reality, and engineering and also medicine. And doctors also over represented, although to a smaller extent in the Muslim sample, are the most elite degrees systematically all across the Muslim world. So those are the students with the best grades, the hardest working, the most talented. And we argue that those are the individuals that are the most frustrated by the economic development failure by the bad labour market... in countries where engineers and doctors are doing well, they actually don't appear. And in those countries where they're doing badly, they only appear among radicals at a time when the economy turns sour.’...

'If we look at the sort of community of people who are involved in Jihadist activity, the overwhelming majority are connected to someone else. They know another jihadi, they know somebody involved in this sort of activity. And that individual helps provide the sort of connection. There're very, very few cases where you can find an individual who sat at a computer, you know, Googled some stuff, watched a few videos and said ohps, I’m a jihadi and going off and participating in a terrorist organization… And in some ways, the difficulty of looking at it through the sort of solely their individual profiles is saying okay. So, you know, how many of them are this age? How many come from this city or that city, it doesn't necessarily throw up the sort of answers, which I would argue may be more useful, which is the fact that it is a very social activity'…

‘What is interesting here that we're also talking about left wing groups here as well. And when you examine these you don't find as it were, that left wing extremists are going to be drawn primarily from people who are engineers. And they're prominent among right wing extremists as well as Islamists, but if you're looking at left wing groups, it’s the humanities and social science from which recruits seem to come,’

‘Yes, that's quite right. So being social scientists ourselves, we're certainly also part of the risk group, just of a different type. And that leads to the argument in the second half of the book that goes beyond relative deprivation, which is that different personality profiles very broadly, on average, tend to get drawn to different disciplines and they're correlated and we showed that with survey data from from 20 or more European countries, they tend to be correlated with certain certain outlooks on social issues, on political issues that are quite systematically different from one discipline to the next.’…

‘One policy implication regarding the Muslim world, and that is that educational reform should focus more on primary and secondary schooling. And there should be less overproduction of graduates which has been kind of the bane of specifically Middle Eastern labour markets’"