Writing condolence letters is difficult – how can you get across in words the feelings of loss and sympathy which often seem a little too big for the sheet of writing-paper? The Emperor Susenyos of Abyssinia didn’t do badly, writing of the death of the Jesuit Father Pedro Paez: ‘Were this paper to be the … More Gathering Up Spilt Waters
I published a working paper recently under the title Immunising the Mind: How can education reform contribute to combatting violent extremism in which I commented on the fact that the recruitment of jihadis in the Middle East and North Africa seems to correlate to some extent with their choice of subject at university. Diego Gambetta of … More The Two Cultures and the Jihad
In the case of Fnideq, with its extraordinary density of young terrorist recruits (see my last post) I find myself mulling not just over propaganda, but over contagion, and wonder if the tools of epidemiology might not be as useful to understand it as radicalization theory. I don’t of course mean by this simply the glib image of ‘radical Islam’ as … More Herd Immunity and e-pidemics
