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A panel discussion with Clark McCauley and Alexandra Blackman
Panelists: Clark McCauley and Alexandra Blackman
Moderator: Martha Crenshaw
*Location changed to: Room 280B, Classroom Building, Stanford Law School
The panel will explore new approaches to understanding radicalization from social and psychological perspectives. McCauley will describe a two-pyramids model that distinguishes radicalization of opinion from radicalization of action. He will explore the practical implications of this approach, including the potential for the fight against radical ideas to actually increase radical actors, and use the model to explore the radicalization of lone wolf terrorists. Blackman will present a new research project which seeks to explain patterns of radicalization at mosques in contemporary Tunisia. Her approach goes beyond socio-economic class-based explanations to investigate variation within working class communities in Tunisia, and emphasizes the agency of radicalizers—actors who actively seek to radicalize local communities—upon the radicalized.
Speaker bios:
Dr. Clark McCauley is Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. His research interests include stereotypes, group dynamics, intergroup conflict, and the psychological foundations of genocide and terrorism. He is a consultant and reviewer for the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for research on dominance, aggression and violence, and a principal investigator of the National Consortium for Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (NC-START). With Dan Chirot he is author of Why not kill them all? The logic of mass political murder and finding ways of avoiding it (Princeton University Press, 2006). With Sophia Moskalenko he is author of Friction: How radicalization happens to them and us (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is founding editor of the journal, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict.
Alexandra Blackman is a third year PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at Stanford. Her research focuses on politics of the Middle East and state regulation of religion. She is also interested in the role that local leaders can play in the development of new religious ideas and identities. She has conducted fieldwork in Egypt and Tunisia. She is also a graduate fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.
Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI and a professor of political science by courtesy at Stanford. She has written extensively on the issue of political terrorism; her recent work includes “Trajectories of terrorism: Attack patterns of foreign groups that have targeted the United States, 1970–2004,” in Criminology & Public Policy, 8, 3 (August 2009) (with Gary LaFree and Sue-Ming Yang), “The Obama Administration and Counterterrorism,” in Obama in Office: the First Two Years, ed. James Thurber (Paradigm Publishers, 2011), and “Will Threats Deter Nuclear Terrorism?” in Deterring Terrorism: Theory and Practice, ed. Andreas Wenger and Alex Wilner (Stanford University Press, 2012). She is also the editor of The Consequences of Counterterrorism (Russell Sage Foundation, 2010). In 2011 Routledge published Explaining Terrorism, a collection of her previously published work.
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