Karin von Hippel's latest chapter, "The Role of Poverty in Radicalization and Terrorism," in DEBATING, ed. Stuart Gottlied

By Karin von Hippel

""Of all the debates on terrorism that have taken place in the eight years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the impact of poverty on terrorism has been the most emotional, the most anecdotal, and the least methodical. Several prominent economists and researchers have mined the data to demonstrate that—contrary to conventional wisdom—terrorists are not poor and uneducated. If anything, they tend to come from the ranks of the middle and upper classes—the “haves” rather than the “have-nots.”  Alan Krueger concluded, “The bottom line . . . is that poor economic conditions do not seem to motivate people to participate in terrorist activities.”

Even when confronted by this research, world leaders tend to disregard it: they continue to blame poverty and its corollaries (alienation, humiliation, marginalization, and globalization) for “growing” terrorists, relying more on intuition rather than any rigorous research. At the March 2002 World Development Summit in Monterey, Mexico, leaders such as President George W. Bush and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan declared that the fight against poverty was intrinsically linked to the fight against terrorism.  In his farewell address to the United Nations on September 23, 2008, President Bush remarked, “The extremists find their most fertile recruiting grounds in societies trapped in chaos and despair, places where people see no prospect of a better life. In the shadows of hopelessness, radicalism thrives. . . . Overcoming hopelessness requires addressing its causes: poverty, disease, and ignorance.” 

These leaders’ proclamations have, in turn, put enormous pressure on bilateral and multilateral development agencies to formulate policies and programs to counter radicalization, based on an insufficient empirical database.

Should we spend more time educating leaders and policymakers so that we can officially close the case on this debate and move on to the arguably more important, hard-edged counter-terrorist challenges, such as policing and intelligence sharing? Or is there a chance that the emotion-driven, data-poor poverty defenders may at least be partially correct, while the cold-hearted, data-rich number crunchers may be overlooking critical aspects in the debate?

This essay indeed posits that the focus of the research conducted thus far has been too narrow and not current enough to rule out poverty as a critical contributing factor in terrorism. In particular, such research has not taken into account the socioeconomic dynamics of the communities in which terrorists operate (their support base); it has not fully explored the drivers for the ordinary foot soldiers; nor has it taken into account recent manifestations of the terrorist threat. This is not to argue that poverty is the primary cause of terrorism, but rather that socioeconomic conditions are relevant to understanding the rise of radicalism and the development and support for terrorism in a growing number of situations. An improved understanding of the connections between economic vulnerability, on the one hand, and radicalism and terrorism, on the other, should help governments and multilateral agencies determine more appropriate and effective policies.

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