Interview with Dr Florence Gaub – Summer 2017
[Posted on the YouTube channel of International Cultic Studies Association: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laZw7nvU9AU]
OS = Oliver J. Smith
FG = Dr Florence Gaub
OS: Dr Florence Gaub is a Senior Analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies where she heads the Middle East and North Africa programme. In her work, she focuses on conflict, strategy and security, with particular emphasis on Iraq, Lebanon and Libya; she also works on Arab military forces more generally, conflict structures and geostrategic dimensions of the Arab region.
Dr Gaub wrote a paper called, ‘The Cult of ISIS’ which was published in Survival: Global Politics and Strategy in early 2016. I asked Dr Gaub about the links that can be made between cults and terrorist groups, and the strategic implications of these links.
OS: Dr Florence Gaub, it’s a real pleasure to talk to you today, hi!
FG: Hello, how are you?
OS: I’m good, how are you?
FG: I’m very good.
OS: So, I suppose the first place to start would be to ask how you got into this in the first place?
FG: Well, you’re probably familiar with the use of the word ‘cult’ in the context of ISIS by certain politicians but that’s not why I looked into it. I mean, I was familiar with the term but the main reason I looked into it is because I watched a documentary about Scientology, and the documentary was on Netflix, called ‘Clear’, I actually watched—and this is the weird part of the story because I read an article about Tom Cruise, so it’s really Tom Cruise who got me to think about this—and while I was watching this documentary, mainly driven by my 1980s crush on Tom Cruise(!), this was a documentary made by people who had left Scientology, and they were describing their experience in the organisation...
I realised that they share a lot of traits with terrorist organisations in general but particularly with ISIS. And that’s why I started digging deeper into it. I mean, there’s a body of research on this. But really, it is this accidental discovery that Scientology and ISIS have certain things in common that got me into this and it’s basically all Tom Cruise’s fault.
OS: So, we have Tom to blame for this?
FG: Exactly.
OS: That’s the documentary, ‘Going Clear’, I think?
FG: Yes, exactly.
OS: Exactly, cool. And so that’s what led you to writing this paper which you wrote a couple of years ago now, ‘The Cult of ISIS’?
FG: Yes, exactly.
OS: So, could you just talk a little bit about this paper, it’s talking about the strategic implications of viewing ISIS as not just a terrorist group but also something a little bit cultic?
FG: Yes, exactly. So, what I started doing after I watched that documentary, I looked into, basically in parallel, the two different types of organisation: cults and terrorist organisations. How do they recruit, how do they identify the targets that they are looking for, what do they do with the individuals once they have them under their control, what are the mechanisms to hold them, what are the mechanisms to motivate them, to keep them committed to the organisation, and then once they have that loyalty what do they do with it? And I discovered, I was really astonished that the similarities were actually so important that I’m not even sure if the theoretical distinctions between the two organisations, or types of organisations, are that important because I think it’s really blurry, because they both use so many similar approaches.
Now, they don’t necessarily use these individuals for the same purpose but it’s very, very similar in terms of, yeah, the people they are looking for and what they do with them. It’s almost identical.
OS: Yeah, they’re both quite strategic in the way that they go about utilising the members of the groups, right?
FG: Well, essentially what they both have in common, and where a cult is particularly different from a religion, because that was the trickiest part... I mean, we all know more or less what a terrorist organisation is. It’s an organisation that uses assymetric means, essentially, to scare a wider population.
A cult is a bit more difficult to define because people confuse them with sects. Now, a sect is a very small religious organisation but a cult, you could argue, yeah, it’s also a small religious organisation but the main difference between religions and cults is that cults establish many authoritarian systems. So, their main objective is to establish totalitarian control over a group of people to then use them for a different purpose. Now, for cults, that’s mostly self-serving. So, to, I don’t, enrichment of the leadership and so forth, whereas terrorist organisations then go a step further and use that loyalty or the totalitarian control that they’ve established over this group of people to achieve political means. But until that step, what do we do now with this control, they’re really identical.
And the strategic implication is, this is why we don’t care so much about cults, because they don’t do harm to a wider population, they only do harm to the people that are in the organisation. But the terrorist organisation will use that strong bond they have created with these individuals for very destructive effects, for terrorist attacks obviously, suicide bombings, I mean it doesn’t have to be just violent... it could also be hate-speech, and all the, let’s say, logistical aspects that also play an important role in terrorism. That’s what they use them for. And what that means for us, who are fighting terrorist organisations, is that we have to understand the bond. The real added value for an organisation is not that just someone shows up and wants to, ‘join the club’ but he or she will be very, very committed thanks to that bond.
So, for us, it means looking deeper into the recruitment process, into all these mechanisms that are then used once they are in the ‘club’, so to speak, to keep them in the organisation. That is, I think, really misunderstood and not really taken enough into account, I think.
OS: Yeah, so there’s a lot there going on, I mean, you’re talking about bonding. The overlap there seems to be hitting on two key things, it’s this totalitarian control as well as this deep bonding of the members. This seems to be thing that ties terrorist groups and cults...
FG: Yes, and it’s very sophisticated psychological tools, essentially, that they both use. So, it starts with, well, firstly, identifying the target and thanks to modern technology, that’s easier for ISIS today than it was for Scientology, let’s say, in the 70s and 80s, but it’s not enough to know that somebody’s a sympathiser. Then, you have to understand the psychological profile of that person, what will make him or her an ideal target, and there are different types.
I mean, contrary to what the media are telling us, there isn’t just one sick individual at home, there can be someone who responds well to humanitarian things, someone who responds well to the appeal of a community, and so forth. So, there are different types. But they’re very skilled in figuring out who this individual is that they’re talking to and then a conversation is established, and then once there is already a certain proximity and understanding of what the individual in question will need, then the crucial step is to get them, in the case of ISIS, to leave their families and to come to Syria and Iraq. That’s what all cults do, cults break the bond an individual has with his or her family, friends, and regular environment. Why? Because once you are detached from everything that gives you a sense of normality, you are much easier to be influenced.
And so, then once you are—well, not you, obviously—but once an individual is an area under their control, that’s when the real work begins. You know, be it military training, even more isolation, highly regulated access to food, to anything recreational, which then creates a psychological dependency between the individual and the organisation, and that... up to that point, there is virtually no distinction between ISIS and other cults.
So, that is very sophisticated but I think one important point to remember is that they—both cults and terrorist organisations, terrorist organisations that use cultish methods—are looking for individuals that have a certain sense of ‘void’ in their life. So, there can be something that each of us has probably experienced at some point, you know, a sense of loss after a break-up, after divorce, change of job, change of school, change of apartment. It can be anything that leads to just a mild depression, you don’t have to be crazy or really fully depressed to have that sense of ‘void’ and lack of connection to other people, and that’s where they’re... So, basically that’s potentially a large group of people, and that’s where they’re terribly skilled at finding and opening, let’s say, that small crack and turning it into a large window of opportunity for them to go into.
OS: Right, so, you’re saying that this sort of lack of meaning in someone’s life, it could be something that drives them to be more susceptible, perhaps, to the message that ISIS, for example, would put out. But it also seems the case that there are multiple pathways in, would you say that it’s possible for someone to go into this, you know, to join a group like ISIS and to really know what they’re getting themselves in for? Or would you say it’s always the case that they’ve been tricked in some way?
FG: Well, firstly, yes, there are different pathways in and that’s why it’s also so complex for law enforcement to establish a profile. There is, of course, a preference to establish a profile based on age and gender, and perhaps religion, but the variety we see with ISIS in all these regards... I mean, we have a certain age-bracket, we have a certain tendency in terms of religion, but we have 25% of converts, we have people from the most isolated parts of France that convert to Islam and then join ISIS, so there is no one explanation. It’s not the average young Arab from the suburb of Paris who’s really angry at the Central State and will pick up weapons. It’s much more complex than that.
So, the different pathways... As I said, the recruiter will have to understand what this individual requires the most. I mean, I mentioned a ‘void’ but that void can be filled by many different things. Meaning can be filled with, depending on the individual, with a sense of connection, so that can be appealing to the individual’s need for being part of a group. So, you say, “You come to us, you will be part of a like-minded group, you will never be alone again.” Then, some young men respond very well to that appeal of warfare and, you know, be a hero and a warrior for once.
Others, women in particular but not exclusively so, respond very well to the humanitarian appeal, you know, ‘Come and help fight people killing Syrian children.’ And again, others have a desire for meaning and, let’s say, rejuvenation or ‘restart’, so with those, you can actually appeal to... well, you can offer a very pure—I mean, ‘pure’ in brackets—this “pure” Islamic lifestyle and in that sense, it’s leaving this decadent Western world behind to get something really pure and so forth. So, there are many different ways to get in and, in that sense, nobody is tricked because they will get what they’ve been offered. For instance, for cult members, writ large, after joing a cult, initially, happiness levels go up, because the cult gives them something they were looking for. And I think it’s the same with ISIS.
You know, the human psyche is a truly phenomenal thing because it’s not as simple as, ‘Oh, once they get there, they see the violence, they change their minds...’, I mean, I’m pretty sure that everybody sees, once they’re in the territory, that not everything was as they imagined. But what in the recruitment process was offered, that they usually get. But they didn’t realise, perhaps, that they were also signing up to seeing a lot of dead bodies, that they would be submitted to airstrikes, and so forth. But even that can be rationalised away, because if the organisation gives you a lot of positive other things in return, you will be inclined to blame the Western World or United States, or whatever, or a single individual that went off track. So, there is a very intricate psychological process in place. But tricking people, I think that is not the case. They are usually offered something and they do get that what they’ve been offered.
OS: Right, right. OK, so what would you say are the most important implications of viewing ISIS, and other terrorist groups, as being also cultic? Would you say it’s mainly in the recruitment process, or...?
FG: ...and the return. Because...
OS: Right.
FG: ...we have never had such a large group of Europeans joining one single entity. I mean, we’ve had other terrorist organisations before, obviously, but they didn’t draw from many different European countries at the same time. So, in that sense, it’s very international, obviously. So, suddenly, we are wondering what will we do with these 5,000 people that come back, although I think, actually, of the 5,000, 1,000 have been killed, but let’s say 4,000 come back. That’s a truly astonishing number and I think here the reaction has...
OS: That’s 4,000 back into Europe as a whole, is it?
FG: That would... Well, the potential that could come back. So far, I think 1,500 have come back and there are still 2,500 in Syria and Iraq.
OS: Right.
FG: This is the latest number but let’s just take them as a symbolic number because we don’t know 100% for sure, but it’s a very big cohort and so the policy-maker’s reaction is to, well, to look at that huge task and obviously hope that perhaps some are traumatised and want to just return to a normal life and never hear from ISIS again. And then, so the question is, what do we do with these people?
I think we have an understanding that if we do absolutely nothing, then we create a problem but what is it that we do? And I think here the cult dimension is very important. It is my opinion that, considering that the recruitment process and the socialisation process, once they’re in the organisation, is so highly psychological and individual, that you cannot deradicalise in a group collectively. You know, you can’t just put them all in a place and give them lessons on citizenship or democracy. I don’t think that’s what’s going to work. It’s going to be much, much more complex than that and unfortunately, the deradicalisation programs we’ve had so far are not terribly successful in breaking this bond between the individual and the organisation. Even if a lot of truly negative things have happened, and we know this from literature on cults in the 1970s, unless an individual truly wants to leave this ideology behind, he or she will be inclined to maintain a certain bond with that cult. And that means that we probably have to deal with, well, maybe like, let’s say, alcoholics that stop drinking, people that can function without it but that will feel a tendency in that direction for a very long time. Particularly...
OS: Maybe forever, yeah.
FG: Yeah, maybe even forever. Particularly for those who stayed for more than a year. I mean, after a year, it’s kind of a break... if you stayed in the cult for a year or longer, then you’re very, very likely to, yeah, have a life-long attachment to this organisation and we don’t really know, in policy terms, how to handle that because it’s a huge number, number one.
Number two, there is a desire to just solve the problem quickly when probably we would need psychological care for a longer time and then, what do we do with people who don’t really want to deradicalise. Yes, they want to have a normal life in Europe but they will always feel emotionally attached to an organisation that is fundamentally an enemy of our world values. And I think we have not really thought through what that means, because I see a potential lingering pool of recruits for a future organisation or, well, for ISIS, even now, calling on terrorists or for terrorist attacks committed by these people. So, it’s a combination of a security issue and a psychological issue that we are not really prepared to deal with.
OS: There was... a deradicalisation centre was shut down in France this year, I think, because...
FG: Yes.
OS: Yeah, so something isn’t working, clearly. In this paper, ‘The Cult of ISIS’, you mention one of the potential solutions might be to try to enable people to escape from groups like ISIS, perhaps by offering deals or maybe an amnesty or something like this. But I’m not sure that there’s much political appetite for that. You know, there’s a lot of people who would say things like, “Well, just throw their passports away”, you know, “These people are beyond help, we don’t want these people back”, sort of thing.
FG: Yeah, I mean don’t forget, I wrote that two years ago. So, at that time, I thought, at least for those that displayed a willingness to break with the organisation, maybe we could give them an option. But we are now at a stage where, probably of all the returnees, it’s very difficult to distinguish between those who are actually, genuinely interested in leaving the organisation and those that are just keen to escape the legal consequences of their actions.
So, I’m afraid that I’m more on the non-deterrent side... I’m more convinced that we cannot, because it’s such a psychological issue, because we don’t know how to handle it, I’m afraid that the only consequence for now is to convict those that committed crimes and put them in prison, and then we’ll see or hope that by the time they’re older, they just don’t have an appetite to conduct terrorist attacks. I think that, at least, you might not deradicalise them but you will be able to stop them from conducting attacks.
But, as you said, the appetite, I think, in Europe, it depends very much on the country. In Germany, I see a tendency to be more inclined to offer amnesties and to go into psychological care. I think in France, the appetite for that is completely dead after the... actually, it’s not just one, I think it’s two deradicalisation programs that proved to be failures, ranging from, I don’t know, the poster girl for deradicalisation travelling to Syria shortly afterwards, this shut-down centre and so forth, so I think in France, it’s a very disillusioned moment when it comes to that. And the consequence will be, let’s just build more prisons and lock them up. That is the only solution but it’s not a solution, it’s just a measure, I would say.
OS: It’s a stop-gap.
FG: Exactly. You asked me in one of your messages, wouldn’t it be easier to teach people resilience? I think it’s an extraordinary question but it really shows us that in our educational system, there’s very little taught in the sense of, how do I deal with frustration, how do I deal with loneliness, how do I deal with lack of meaning, and so forth. I mean, this is really, we are almost in the philosophical realm now. And the states...
OS: It goes quite deep, doesn’t it?
FG: Yes, the states don’t really teach that. But you’re right, probably, they should, because there’s a huge part of that that we will encounter in our adult life, and [which] we don’t know how to handle, and it’s very easy for such groups to manipulate people that feel, yeah, lonely and meaningless, and so forth.
OS: Yeah, I mean, in that message that I sent, I was saying something like that all prevention strategies, they seem to come at the problem of radicalisation a little bit too late in the game. By the time someone’s acted, they’ve probably radicalised in the mind, perhaps a long time before, and they’re just waiting for the opportunity to act it out, sort of thing. So, perhaps resilience is... would be a more successful longterm strategy compared to, say, awareness or merely surveillance, you know, monitoring people.
But you mentioned something just now about how cultic experts could really play quite a key role in deradicalisation in terms of their experience with helping people to resocialise from these environments. Is that where you see cultic researchers perhaps best utilised in security studies at the moment?
FG: Yeah, I think in general, I’m a big fan of tearing down these walls between the social sciences because ultimately, it’s artificial. We need to understand humanity as a very interesting phenomenon and that includes everything from philosophy to economy to political science to psychology. And for me, I mean, I also work on military forces and for that, I actually ventured out into sociology and everything sociology says about organisations in general, not just military organisations. So, we can learn a lot by cross-fertilising thoughts.
And the best ideas, I always have, when I venture out into something that is entirely out of my ‘home discipline’, which is political science, you know, by watching that documentary about something that I have no connection to, that actually gives me the biggest, ‘Aha!’ moments where I want to dig deeper.
OS: Right.
FG: So, cult experts, definitely, in security studies, but also in political science and anything that’s related to, well, the existence of humans writ large, they have a lot to offer and they should be included more. The same goes for economists, there’s even a link between, a not-so-obvious link, between economy and psychology. You know, unemployed people, obviously, they are easier radicalised than employed people. So, what is the link there? Is there something we could look deeper into?
We look... We know that there is a link somewhere between poverty, unemployment, and radicalisation, but it’s not clear-cut. Not every poor, unemployed person will radicalise. So, what’s the difference between those who do and those who don’t? So, these are all very, very interesting questions for researchers to dig deeper into and it requires a much broader interdisciplinary approach to do that effectively.
OS: So, you’re talking about more interdisciplinarity, more communication between the fields sort of going on.
FG: Absolutely.
OS: One question I wanted to ask you was about definitions. So, this is, you know, you can look at cults and you can look at terrorist groups, and one of the key similarities for me is that it’s really hard to define what these things are. You know, definitions of ‘cult’ and ‘terrorism’, they’re very nebulous. What definition is the best one to use, and how do we go about defining these things?
In the case of terrorism, especially, where we avoid the idea of ‘state-sponsored terrorism’, perhaps, it seems like the definition could be seen as agenda-driven, like, there’s an agenda behind it?
FG: Yeah, of course, I mean, every definition by default says a lot about the people who use it and who prefer it. I think the first thing to understand is that in order to define something you have to truly understand it. So, that means understanding who does what, with what means, and why. And then... It requires quite a lot of work to come up with a very succint definition.
For me, terrorism, and I looked at this before even 2001 because, yeah, again, one of those cross-fertilising moments when I looked at a play by Albert Camus about terrorists in Tsarist Russia, and I still like that definition that antedated this whole Islamist wave because it was more neutral. If you want, we can talk about this Islamic agenda in a second because it’s an important dimension.
But, the definition used then was that terrorism is a tactic used by a small group to intimidate a majority or a larger group, with assymetric means. So, I mean, the term obviously comes from ‘fear’—terreur, terror—but it is by default an assymetric tactic. So, it means that it’s a smaller group trying to act on a larger group and ideally, trying to get, through this action, the larger group to act in a certain way. So, as an example, in the case of ISIS, ISIS will use terrorism in Europe to polarise European societies, ideally to provoke a civil war between the Muslim minority and the non-Muslim majority. But that... or let’s look at the IRA. The IRA used terrorism in the UK to get the government to change its political stance on Northern Ireland.
So, this would be my definition because it’s quite neutral and I think it applies to nearly every case. State-sponsored terrorism is, I think, still uses a small group to serve its own means. So, that would actually broaden the question and, yeah, OK, who helps this small group to use terrorist methods on a larger group. But, by definition, because it’s an assymetric tactic, the individuals or the groups using terrorist tactics will be in the minority and I think this is something that, because we’re so scared of them, we often forget. That they are the minority, that’s why they are using this tactic. So, they are, by definition, the weaker party. But that’s why they have to use fear to make themselves look bigger and make us feel smaller.
A cult is an organisation that, in contrast to terrorist groups, that uses religious rhetoric—i.e. rhetoric that explains the meaning of life, the universe, and so forth—to establish authoritarian control over a group of people. And the objective then is normally for the leadership to take advantage of that, be it in financial terms, in sociological terms, and all kinds of terms. So, that’s why it overlaps. A terrorist group will absorb cultic features but then use it to perpetuate terrorist acts; a cult will not necessarily do that.
These would be the definitions that I prefer because they’re very much neutral in the sense that it’s about who does what, why, and with what means.
OS: Yeah, I think the point I was trying to get at was that no-one really self-identifies as a member of a cult or a member of a terrorist group. You know, the old saying, ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’, that sort of thing...
FG: Yeah, I mean, of course, once you’re inside, you’ve bought into the narrative and you think you are right. One interesting fact I found was that we talk a lot about this doomsday narrative of ISIS and the fact that, you know, suicide, to us, seems the most, well, absurd act of violence because it doesn’t even serve the person who committed the act. But that’s actually very, very common in terrorist... sorry, in cults. So, be it this UFO cult, I can’t remember the name now, collective suicide is very, very common and so is this idea that only the members of the cult...
OS: Are you talking about ‘Heaven’s Gate’ there, sorry?
FG: Yes, exactly, Heaven’s Gate, thank you... this idea that only the in-group knows that it’s the end-times. But all of this actually serves the purpose to create cohesion to the inside, to strengthen authoritarian control of a small group of people over a larger group. It all has the same mechanisms, really.
OS: So, that sort of leads me on nicely to the next question, which is, you know, why has there been such a focus on ideology and, you know, Muslim minority issues, instead of these processes? Why are we... it’s like some of these political leaders seem to have ‘taken the bait’, sort of thing? Why is this?
FG: Yes, you’re right. Some of us have taken the bait.I think it’s a lot easier for people to talk about Islam, I mean, we’re talking about Westernised Europeans here, as a religion that they don’t know very well, as a religion that is practised by, usually, a minority in their country, that, in a lot of cases, has not integrated terribly well. So, it becomes this exotic, foreign ‘Other’. And so, in that process of ‘Othering’, it’s easier or it’s more interesting to talk about that than to talk about something fairly neutral that is the ideology, I mean, not neutral... but ideology, if you take it out of the Islamic context, because that’s what it is, is in itself not so emotional, whereas where ISIS has been very successful is actually, essentially taking a lot of the stereotypes that certain... that a lot of people in Europe have about Islam, saying, “Yes, everything that you believe that’s bad about Islam, that is actually Islamic, and we think it’s good.”
Of course, the vast majority of Muslims, including a lot of Muslim clerics, I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen the letter to Baghdadi by, I think, signed by 150 famous Islamic scholars, they disagree with ISIS. But the question is not, is ISIS Islamic or not? But the question is, because essentially every cult will use religious narratives to give itself legitimacy, so you have numerous, numerous cults that use Christian and Jewish narratives to give themselves, to lend themselves, a degree of legitimacy. So, of course, there are also cults that use Islamic narratives.
But for us, I agree with you in that focussing on Islam and how it links to terrorism doesn’t give us the answer to the real question, that is, why do people radicalise, why do they become a security-issue for us, what can we do about this? There is no discussion about Islam that will give us the solution because every cult, every terrorist organisation will pick and choose from a large body of religious texts to justify themselves. But if you look at Scientology, this is one of the cults that actually completely made up, well not ‘made up’ but...
OS: Yeah, it’s quite blatant aswell, yeah.
FG: ...it’s quite blatant, it has nothing to do with mainstream Christianity or Judaism or any of the other monotheistic religions, but people in the cult believe that aswell. So, it’s completely irrelevant what they’re told to believe. What interests me as a researcher is not what they believe in but why do they believe in it, and I think this is the question that’s much more tricky to answer, and that’s why people prefer to focus on Islam, which is in any case... we are in an environment that is now Islamophobic, and so it’s a lot more emotional and it’s easier to point fingers and say, ‘Oh, this is all their fault.’ But I think it’s much more complex than that.
OS: And this maybe speaks to this idea that we’re looking for quick solutions to this, which is perhaps the wrong approach.
FG: Yes, we do, yeah.
OS: Something I wanted to ask you about was recruitment strategies of terrorist groups like ISIS who are, you know, perhaps cultic in the way that they go about things. It’s a sort of propaganda scheme that they have going on and, in some sense, it’s quite clever the way that they are recruiting people. I mean, you’ve talked in your research about targeting of women and talking about targeting petty criminals, you know, and they’re quite selective in the way that they go about, you know, trying to attract these people into the group.
I suppose one question I’d be interested to hear the answer to would be, can we trace a pattern from the types of recruitment that we’re seeing to, perhaps, group goals? Is there a sort of strategic, you know, something strategic we can get out of that?
FG: Yeah, I think what’s really interesting about ISIS is that it has been very, very clever, much more targeted and strategic in its recruitment process than perhaps other organisations, in the sense that, you mentioned the petty criminals, I think two-thirds, or even more depending on the country, of European fighters that joined ISIS, had a petty criminal history.
Interestingly, I think only about 30% of them say that they were radicalised in prison. I mean, prison sentences appear at some point in a lot of terrorist’s CVs but it’s not the prison itself that radicalises people. So, to me, that means that there is a history of struggling with society, with the rules of society, of the State, and then it’s in that struggle that the organisation cleverly taps into.
But in addition, petty criminals have a fountain of knowledge that is of a lot of interest to ISIS. I mean, procuring money illegally means that you... you know, a lot of international laws targeting the financing of terrorism actually focus on organised crime and on money-laundering and so forth, but all rather collective and actually very big sums. Now, a lot of the terrorist attacks in Europe, for instance, were funded with, well, very little money and usually generated through...
OS: Small amounts of money, yeah.
FG: Yeah, small amounts of money and petty crime. So, I don’t know, credit-card fraud, fake sneakers sales, drug sales, and so forth. And that is very interesting because it flies under the radar of law-enforcement, I mean of course law-enforcement looks at petty criminals but not with this ‘terrorist eye’, you know, it’s not seen as a security issue, it’s seen as a, well, an economic issue or maybe a social issue but that’s it. So, there’s definitely... ISIS is different in that, from Al-Qaeda which did not have a preference for criminals because Al-Qaeda looked more at people that were ideologically sounder in their operational capacity to act, I think ISIS has been very clever in that.
Of course, the next step is ISIS also targets chemists and biologists in the view of potentially manufacturing IEDs, be it in Europe or in their territories. And, of course, lastly, the famous call by Baghdadi when he declared the Caliphate, he did call on doctors and engineers and anyone that’s helpful to them in building their state, so to say. But, to my knowledge, it was not particularly successful in attracting doctors and engineers. I mean, it is particularly attractive to people that have nothing to lose in that sense, and that want a new start in life, I mean one of those posters that ISIS put out there for, well, to target petty criminals, was, “The people with the worst pasts, they often have the best future”, or something like this. So, really, yeah...
OS: Yes, I was quite surprised to see that slogan, yeah.
FG: Well, it really offers you, who’s unhappy in their current life and who feels rejected by society, perhaps after a prison-stay or a conviction or whatever, here, have a new life for you and make it count.
So, the recruitment pattern is insightful but I think it goes beyond just a state-building project, I think it goes to the other level which is operational capacity, recruiting people that already know how to smuggle stuff into a country, out of a country, be it money or weapons or fake passports, everything that you need as a terrorist, you also need as a petty criminal, and I think that shows us that their end-game in Europe... I think we’re in for quite a long time when it comes to, at least, their will to strike, at least at a low-level terrorist attacks.
OS: And they’re utilising these people who have these underworld skills...
FG: Yes.
OS: ...in particular.
FG: But we didn’t talk about the women, do you want me to say something about the women?
OS: Yeah, sure, so I mean, especially for the women, it does seem quite unusual to think of a woman putting themselves willingly into this situation. I mean, it’s a similar question to one I asked earlier – do these women really know what they’re getting themselves into!?
FG: I think there are two things that I want to say to the question of women in ISIS. I think the first one is that, we misunderstand... I mean, there is a study done and it has nothing to do with ISIS but about female happiness in the United States, and it’s a longterm study that started in, I think, the late 60s. And it did show that women are today unhappier than they were in the 70s, and the conclusion, the wrong conclusion would be to say, ‘Feminism doesn’t make women happy.”
But I think it’s a bit more complex than that because we have not established feminism in that sense, most women, at least that take part in that study, juggle both. So, women have not achieved parity in that sense, they still... they are now allowed to work but at home they still perform most of the household duties. So, for a woman in the UK or in France today, it’s quite a confusing place to be in, they’re kind of stuck between the old and the new. And some, those that struggle with this, well, somewhat unclear gender situation, they will perceive an organisation like ISIS, which offers them very clear guidelines for what it means to be a woman, appealing.
But what is interesting, and I think that’s the second point that’s important for me when it comes to women in ISIS, particularly the Europeans, is that when they choose to join the organisation, they do that out of a very feminist mindset! Because I’ve noticed that most of the women in ISIS, the non-Syrian, non-Iraqi, are actually Europeans, not from the Arab world. Why? Because they can actually travel by themselves, they can procure themselves some money to do so, they’re much freer, and most importantly, they see themselves also as agents of their lives. So, ‘This is my life, I will do what I want with it and I will join this terrorist organisation.’
So, it’s kind of a, like, a feminist joke on them, in the end, that they end up in this hugely anti-feminist organisation because they want to take agency. Once they’re there, I think there is a difference for the Europeans and the Arab women in the sense that the Europeans enjoy a higher status, especially the converts, and that they will, very often, not just play the role of housewife and mother, that they will play a role on social media, that they will play a role in recruitment, very often they are there to recruit other women... that they often also play the role of, I don’t know how you call that in English, in French you call it pidgen... you know, who transport messages in and out of the territories, so...
OS: OK, yeah.
FG: ...there is an operational dimension to it. So, but your question was, ‘Do they know what they were getting into?’ I think some of them struggled with their reality especially because, for the women, there is a dimension that is not there for the men and that is the intimate relationships, that... OK, maybe, you arrive there and you, well... if a woman arrives and is not married then she is expected to get married. And, OK, maybe she falls in love with this guy but if he dies in battle, then she has to marry someone else rather quickly, and I think there is this emotional dimension that is, maybe, is underestimated by some of them. And that makes it a lot more intimate and requires a lot more personal commitment than it does of the men.
So, I think for the women, it has been at times a lot more difficult because it requires more of their personal, well, intimacy and commitment. But, as a whole, I think, even for them, it is a rewarding experience, exactly as for the men, and this is where, again, this 1950s rhetoric of ISIS is kind of misleading because the women join—there are studies done on that—the women join for the same reasons as the men. Maybe they don’t want to fight on the front line in the way the men do, but they also want meaning, they also want a new start in life, they might even have... well, they have less petty criminal antecedents but they feel as excluded from their society and from their normal lives as the men do.
And so, in that sense, they’re very, very similar, and I think it must be understood also that, when they come back, a lot of them say... play that 50s housewife card back at us and say, ‘Oh, I was manipulated by my husband or by the recruiter, and I’m just a stupid woman.’ But I think they know very well what they got into or they were, in most cases, intelligent enough and had agency enough to take a very important decision like that and I think they must be held accountable for it in the same way as the men are.
OS: You had, I think, you have personal experience, you were involved with the court case of Tareena Shakil?
FG: Yes.
OS: Yeah, the British woman who went to Syria, was it, with her toddlers...
FG: Yes.
OS: ...and then came back and was convicted. Yeah. So, I guess, I mean, we’re getting towards the end of the interview here... I guess, just a very broad sort of question would be, you know, what can cultic researchers learn from the way that security researchers are approaching the problem of terrorism? Is there anything, you know, it seems like we’re talking all about cultic researchers influencing, you know, being able to help with the ‘problem of terrorism’, is there anything that we could bring back, you know, to try and approach the ‘problem of cults’?
FG: Well, I think, where... what cult researchers can look at, what we look at... essentially, it’s... we pick up where they end, so researchers that work on cults, they are mainly interested in the recruitment and what happens in the cult, and maybe after they leave, but the questions that cultic researchers don’t ask is what do the cults do with this power that they have over the people. What’s the objective of the cult? And, I think, that’s what, of course, you know, political scientists or security studies researchers, we’re mainly interested in what do they do with it, we don’t look so much at what’s going on inside. But I think that both questions belong together and I think it’d be beneficial if us political scientists would look at the recruitment process and the psychological and sociological stuff that’s going on in a cult, to learn from it and to apply it to terrorist organisations, but equally for cultic researchers to look at, ‘What is it that the leadership does?’ You know, dig deeper into this authoritarian control.
Because really, what I’ve understood now, from ISIS, is that the line is so fine that we see a lot of potential for essentially any cult moving from cult into terrorist activity, because they have the capacity to do that. It’s a bit like, yeah, it’s a bit like a plutonium program. Yes, you have plutonium, that’s not a nuclear weapon but it might get you there. In a sense, a cult is like that, it’s not yet a terrorist organisation but it has the capacity to become one very quickly. Because it has a large cohort of people under their control so committed to this organisation that they are virtually willing to kill themselves. And that is an interesting question to look at, also in security terms.
OS: Yeah, I think it’s a hugely interesting question. I mean, it seems like any ideology has the potential to turn ‘rotten’, you know, fairly quickly? It just needs the right ingredients, you know...
FG: No, I don’t think that’s useful. I mean, ideology is, in a sense, like the fuel you put in the car, so the problem is the car, it’s not the fuel in itself because it wouldn’t run but if you didn’t have the car, then the fuel would be pointless. So, for me, the whole focus on ideology is misleading, it doesn’t get us anywhere, it doesn’t give us the answer.
I was just in Iraq last week and we had a discussion with some Iraqis who were convinced that it’s all about ideology and all we need is education, and to tell people what the right Islam is. And I disagree with that. I think it starts much, much earlier and ideology comes in later in the game. So, what you mentioned abot resilience, about psychology, about recruitment tactics, and so forth, I think, precedes the ideological component, and all the people who joined ISIS, and buying ‘Islam for Dummies’ before they left, are proof of that statement.
OS: Yeah, I think I’ve probably put it in a very bad way there, but I think what I was trying is something like that, any group can turn into a sort of terrorist group quite quickly, yeah...
FG: Yes, absolutely.
OS: ...yeah. OK, so I think we can wrap it up there, unless you have anything else to say?
FG: No, I think, again, it’s a very interesting topic. We need... the more cross-fertilising we do, the better it is, and the more questions are asked out of the box, the better. So, it is for every researcher advisable to watch documentaries and go to exhibits they would never go to. Just because of Tom Cruise, to get new ideas. And essentially, the best researchers are those that get new ideas, and that’s what we need right now.
OS: Well, thank you Tom Cruise! And thank you, Dr Florence Gaub. That was brilliant, thank you.
FG: And thank you to you.