Why extremism is bad

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You could not be signed in. Sign In Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution Sign in. Purchase Subscription prices and ordering for this journal Short-term Access To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above. This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. An entire generation is at risk of unemployment and social exclusion. The most harmful and usually unrecognised impact of extremism is at the psychological level.

People who have been living in an uncertain situation due to the regular occurrence of violent extremism, develop fear of everything and internalise trauma.

This can lead to a metamorphosis of the psyche, mental decomposition and loss of confidence in oneself and others. In Pakistan, young students became so fearful after the attacks on the school that many of them stopped leaving their homes for sports and other social gatherings. Traumatic experiences build upon each other and cumulatively increase the chance of developing PTSD and depression.

The economic impact of extremism is the closure of many businesses in the affected areas. This results in an increase in poverty, unemployment and various types of crimes. Many women are left as heads of households and a significant number as widows.

Displacement has rendered many women homeless and more vulnerable to exploitation. The loss of loved ones also has a psychological and social impact on these women. However, due to gender norms and in their interplay with local contexts, young women face greater isolation as their mobility in many places have been restricted, affecting their access to education and employment opportunities.

Globally, the intolerance toward minority groups is on the rise in many countries and there is growing insecurity and fear among them. Unfortunately, Muslims make up the majority of victims of hate crimes, threats, attacks on places of worship and forced conversion, particularly in India and China.

In many cases, the reluctance of the state to condemn the attacks on a minority group is also reflected in more stringent laws that discriminate against religious minorities. Deep hatred, some of which previously healed through dialogue and reconciliation, and which permitted distinct ethnic and religious groups to live together in peace and cooperation, has surfaced in social behavior and political movements across the globe.

The ban on headscarves and the rejection of Islamic education and building of Mosques in Western Europe is the result of such tendencies, where the government and communities had no previous objection to it. Among all these negative developments as a result of extremism, there have been some positive changes. In Pakistan, some communities have developed a strong resilience against the ideology of hate, suspicion and exclusion.

They have formed effective community structures and mechanisms to create social cohesion, inter-faith and intra-faith harmony. Education institutions have introduced the Inclusive Peace Curriculum to teach the value of tolerance, pluralism and peaceful coexistence.

They also began laying the groundwork for a separate study, eventually published in , that found that among members of various forces who fought against ISIS, those who expressed the most willingness to fight and die for abstract values like nationhood, heritage and religion tended to prioritize those values over their social groups, like family.

Still, by most such work had come from what fighters said in interviews or surveys. Atran was convinced that sacred values were so deep and powerful that the brain must process them differently than it processes decisions about more mundane issues.

In recent years, chic galleries and boutique clothing stores have begun to spring up between halal butchers and Arabic-language bookshops, filling the boarded-up storefronts emptied by the waves of evictions that ravaged the primarily immigrant neighborhood following the financial crisis. The locale has also been the epicenter for a number of foiled terrorist plots, and is carefully monitored by both Spanish and international intelligence bodies for jihadist activity.

That made it an appealing place for Hamid and his colleagues to recruit radicalized men for their inaugural brain study on extremists. They set their sights on to something first-generation Pakistani men who openly supported Lashkar-e-Taiba, an al-Qaeda affiliate based in South Asia.

So he started to look for Urdu speakers who seemed like they had time on their hands. When he saw likely candidates chatting with friends on park benches or sipping tea at one of the many outdoor terraces in the Raval district, Hamid would approach them cautiously.

For the purposes of the study, a person who fit all three criteria was considered radicalized, in which case, Hamid would call them to ask if their friends might also want to take the survey. As a Pakistani American, Hamid was acutely sensitive to the fact that the people he was approaching might feel profiled. And in fact, a number of the nonradicalized people who gleaned the thrust of the survey questions were offended, he said.

However, he also recognized the scientific importance of focusing on this particular population. It made sense to focus on recruiting from the Pakistani population and Moroccan population for a follow-up study on the brains of budding radicals because they represented the two biggest Sunni Muslim groups in the area.

To protect both the extremists and the study itself, rather than using names, the researchers assigned each volunteer a number. They also tried to avoid asking any questions in the surveys that might put them in tricky legal terrain. By the end of , Hamid and his team had convinced people to take the survey.

Thirty men, ages 18 to 36, agreed. There, a team led by Clara Pretus, a neuroscientist in her mids, put these 30 men through the next stages of the study. The men came to the lab in groups of three or four.

After a brief orientation to ease their nerves, the brain scans would begin. The men would lay prone on the bed of the fMRI machine, which would back them into a tube. Each statement touched on an issue that mattered to the group, based on previous surveys and interviews.

To figure this out, they asked the men to rate how willing they would be, on a scale of 1 to 7, to fight and die for each declaration. The machine snapped pictures of their brains as the men used a handheld device to make their ratings.

In still others, less. After the men had seen how the ratings of their so-called peer group differed from their own, they were given the opportunity to go through the slides one last time—this time outside of the machine—and rate their willingness to fight and die for each statement once again. In cases where anyone changed his mind, scientists would go back through the fMRI images to see what was happening in his brain as he reviewed the peer information that ultimately compelled him to reconsider his initial answer.

After they completed the final task, the men, whose names they never learned, were free to take their money and go, disappearing into the streets. Over the following weeks, the team analyzed the data. As expected, the men expressed greater willingness to fight and die for their sacred values than for their nonsacred values.