Whether to Kill: The Cognitive Maps of Violent and Nonviolent Individuals

By Stephanie Dornschneider

What drives some to violence against the state while others, living in the same place at the same time, turn to nonviolent resistance? And in this age of Islamist terrorism and Islamophobia, does the practice of Islam encourage violence? Structural explanations of violence fail to answer these questions. In Whether to Kill, Stephanie Dornschneider applies the methodology of cognitive mapping to study the beliefs that motivate individuals to take up arms or engage in nonviolent activism. Using a double-paired comparison with control groups, Dornschneider conducted extensive ethnographic interviews with violent and nonviolent Muslims and non-Muslims in both Egypt and Germany, speaking with them about their lives and contexts and what drove them to resist the state. After coding their responses into cognitive maps, which make visible the connections between an individual's beliefs and decisions for behavior, Dornschneider used a computer model to analyze the huge number of possible factors driving people to choose or not choose violence, eventually identifying ten reasoning processes by which violent individuals can be differentiated from nonviolent ones.

Whether to Kill takes a new approach to understanding terrorism. Through first-person accounts of those involved in both violent and nonviolent action against the state—from members of groups as diverse as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jihad, the Socialist German Student Union, and the Red Army Faction—then analyzing that data via cognitive mapping, Stephanie Dornschneider has opened up new perspectives on what drives people to—or away from—the use of political violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Oct 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9780812292015

Book preview

Introduction

As a child, Najeh Ibrahim loved his president. We all loved Nasser, he recalls. He emphasized our country. However, Ibrahim’s positive attitude toward the leader of his country changed as he grew older. Observing waves of arrests of Muslim Brothers and other political opponents, he began to resent the state. We were seeing them come out of prison with marks of torture. When he was seventeen, Ibrahim founded a small group, which quickly spread all over Egypt and soon posed a serious threat to the state: al-Jamaʿat al-Islamiyya. In 1981, this group changed the history of the country: it participated in the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat. Ibrahim was among the leaders who decided to kill the president. He says the decision was made to resist state repression, by young and strong men who had alternatives: Of course I had an alternative. I am a doctor. Look at bin Laden: He is a millionaire but lives like a beggar. Had the state not engaged in repression, Ibrahim believes, Sadat would not have been dead.

Ahmad Saif al-Islam Hassan al-Banna did not love his president as a child. His father was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and assassinated in 1949. When Saif al-Islam became politically active himself, he had bitter experiences. I tried to oppose parliament twice, he recalls his time in the People’s Assembly. They threatened to kill me …. They also threatened my family. He says he refused to give in and went to court instead—but nothing happened. In spite of such experiences, he did not lose hope and continued to believe that the Muslim Brothers’ participation in politics could change the state. It is better to succeed. Someone else replaced me, he comments on his forced withdrawal from elections. I left, and I understand it is not only me who is treated like that. Saif al-Islam says he never considered the use of physical force to confront the state: I will not use violence. I am a judge, and I studied law. My mind does not accept a violation of the law. If I use violence, I will lose. The state will kill us all. Now the state has no reason to do anything against us.

The difference in the behavior of Saif al-Islam and Najeh Ibrahim could not be larger, but the two individuals have some basic commonalities. They believe in the same religion; they lived in the same country during the same time; and they resented the government enough to become politically active against it—even though this exposed them and their families to state repression. These similarities make the difference in the behavior of Saif al-Islam and Najeh Ibrahim puzzling and raise the following research question: Why do some individuals (like Najeh Ibrahim) take up arms, while others who live under the same conditions (like Saif al-Islam) conduct nonviolent activities instead?

This book is dedicated to investigating this question. Focusing on the individuals who take up arms, this question explores areas that may have been overlooked by the large body of literature on violent groups. Specifically, focusing on groups cannot explain why certain individuals but not others form or join violent groups, carry out particular attacks, or sometimes break away from their groups.

The central argument in my investigation of this question is that, contrary to widespread assumptions, both violent and nonviolent individuals act in response to the belief that the state is aggressive. Unlike what is widely believed, I also find that violent individuals do not act in response to beliefs in Islam. Instead, I argue that the motivations of violent and nonviolent individuals are surprisingly similar, and that there are no significant differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. Specifically, my analysis identifies ten mechanisms related to decisions to take up arms (five mechanisms) and to engage in nonviolent activism (five mechanisms).

These mechanisms show that the belief that the state is aggressive is so significant that individuals who hold it may decide to take up arms even if they also believe the state is stronger than they are, and that they will suffer severe consequences from engaging in violence. They also show that the belief that the state is aggressive may encourage individuals to decide to engage in nonviolent activism, even though they do not believe their activity is going to have any effect on state aggression. The analysis furthermore investigates when the individuals would not have decided to take up arms or to engage in nonviolent activism. This counterfactual analysis shows that in the absence of beliefs about threatening state behavior, no individuals would have decided to take up arms, and significantly fewer individuals would have decided to engage in nonviolent activism. By contrast, absence of beliefs about Islam would not have changed the individuals’ decisions. The analysis also shows that nonviolent individuals may be motivated by the belief that there is economic deprivation in their direct environment—a motivation that is usually attributed to violent individuals.

These findings have implications for our understanding of violent individuals by showing that rather than being crazy religious fanatics, violent individuals are not that different from nonviolent individuals and engage in very similar reasoning processes to those underlying mainstream political behavior. They also put in perspective existing explanations by suggesting that political violence is not a consequence of Islam, economic deprivation, or access to violent groups.

To develop this argument, this book draws on political psychology literature and adopts a cognitive mapping approach (CMA) (Axelrod 1976). To my knowledge, this is the first study that adopts this approach to study violent individuals. Cognitive mapping explores the belief systems underlying human behavior, such as violent and nonviolent activism. In this way, it bridges the gap between actors and structures and adds to theories that focus on external factors, which cannot by themselves explain why people engage in certain behavior. Moreover, cognitive mapping allows the systematic exploration of various types of factors underlying behavior—modeled as beliefs—as well as the study of the mechanisms by which these factors are connected with behavior—modeled as systems of beliefs. In this way, the CMA synthesizes factors that are usually addressed by different theories, and it goes beyond analyses that focus on direct relations between particular variables and behavior, rather than on the microlevel mechanisms underlying this behavior.

Taking the actors’ own explanations as the starting point of the analysis, the CMA provides rich inside knowledge into behavior, which cannot be obtained from other methods that involve external research categories. Cognitive maps do not a priori consider certain factors at the expense of others; instead, they cover a large range of factors that the actors themselves consider relevant. These inside factors, which offer a rigorous basis for a bottom-up analysis of human behavior, can then be analyzed by the researcher.

Cognitive maps are usually highly complex and difficult to analyze: typically, they consist of dozens of beliefs and connections between beliefs, which are related to decisions for action. Because of this complexity, it is not obvious how to systematically analyze such maps, and most political scientists have abandoned the approach—even though cognitive mapping used to be considered a valuable tool that has been used successfully (Young 1996: 395).

This book reintroduces the CMA to studies of political science by presenting new possibilities for research with cognitive maps. To cope with the complexity of cognitive maps, I present a computer program I developed with Nick Henderson from the Institute of Mathematical and Computational Engineering at Stanford University. The program is nonstatistical and enables the researcher to systematically study the connections between beliefs and decisions. Specifically, it enables the researcher to (1) systematically identify beliefs connected to decisions to take up arms or engage in nonviolent activism; (2) systematically trace belief chains connected to these decisions; and (3) explore counterfactuals, which show under what conditions individuals would not have decided to take up arms or engage in nonviolent activism. The program is applied to cognitive maps that involve trillions of combinations of beliefs.

To construct cognitive maps, this book applies qualitative methods. Specifically, I conducted ethnographic interviews with formerly violent and nonviolent individuals, and employed James Spradley’s theme analysis (1979) to develop a coding scheme that abstracts the beliefs of different individuals into comparable categories. In this way, this book contributes in-depth knowledge about political violence. It also contributes one of the few studies constructing cognitive maps from ethnographic interviews, which present new information that is very difficult to gather. Based on this information, it provides rich insight that both complements and serves as a check on the large body of literature on political violence that focuses on macrolevel factors without engaging with the actors’ own explanations. As I discuss below, the findings obtained from the analysis put into perspective much of the existing research in political violence.

The research design is a double-paired comparison that includes important control groups that remain absent from most existing studies: violent and nonviolent individuals, as well as Muslims and non-Muslims. To investigate these individuals, this study focuses on two countries, Egypt and Germany. Egypt is an authoritarian state located in the Middle East—a region with a long history of political violence. Over the past decades, Egypt has experienced numerous acts of violence, and Egyptians continue to play an important role in violent groups abroad (for example, the current leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is an Egyptian). A hub of political activism, Egypt is moreover the home of the Muslim Brotherhood—the largest opposition movement in the Middle East and one of the most influential Muslim movements in the world. Most of the individuals who participated in violent and nonviolent activism in Egypt have been Muslim, which indicates that Islam plays an important role in the country. Egypt has a population with a large Muslim majority and a long history of Islamic thought. It has been the home of numerous influential Muslim thinkers (Ibn Khaldun and Muhammad Rashid Rida, for instance, died there), and it houses the greatest authority in Sunni Islam, al-Azhar University. As the most populous state in its region, Egypt also plays a major role in Arab politics. It houses the Arab League and has frequently led talks between Arab states, or between Israel and its neighbors. Finally, Egypt is a rather poor state. In 2013, it ranked number 110 of 187 countries and territories in the UNDP Human Development Index. It has high rates of unemployment and illiteracy.

By contrast, Germany is a democratic state. Since its system was designed very carefully after the fall of the Nazis, it is known as a model of a modern democracy. As the largest economy in Europe, it has played an important role in regional politics, and its people enjoy one of the highest living standards in the world. Nevertheless, Germany has also experienced political violence, and it has been a major setting of political activism in Europe. Unlike their Egyptian counterparts, the individuals who participated in these activities were not Muslim and did not try to introduce an Islamic state. What they had in common was the goal of expelling their government. As a result of these characteristics, violent and nonviolent individuals from Germany can serve as a control group, checking on the findings obtained for the individuals from Egypt. Specifically, studying violent and nonviolent individuals from Germany ensures that results are not subject to individuals who believe in Islam and live in a state that is authoritarian or suffers from economic hardship.

Most of the individuals I study in this book were living in hiding or persecuted by the government at the time I conducted field research for this study (2009–2010). Specifically, the formerly violent individuals I met in Egypt are members of al-Jamaʿat al-Islamiyya and al-Jihad. These groups are responsible for numerous attacks on the Egyptian state, including the assassination of President Sadat in 1981. After the assassination, most of the members of these groups were imprisoned, but some were released a few years later. Some of them, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, left Egypt to unite with other individuals abroad, where they helped form al-Qaeda. Most of them, however, spent decades in Egyptian prisons, where they were often tortured and isolated from their families for extended periods of time. At the end of the 1990s, al-Jamaʿat al-Islamiyya announced an initiative to end violence, which encouraged the state to begin releasing its members from prison. At the time I conducted research for this book, some of them had just been released, which allowed me to contact them in private and try to set up meetings. Although they were usually highly reluctant to talk with me, some agreed to meet with me and, after many hours together, let me ask questions about why they had decided to take up arms.

The nonviolent individuals I interviewed in Egypt are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. At the time I conducted field research, President Husni Mubarak was still in power and the Muslim Brotherhood was his largest opposition. The movement was outlawed and its members were persecuted, although they were allowed to run in the elections as independents. Most of the nonviolent individuals I met had spent time in prison and experienced torture as well. All of them believed they could be arrested and imprisoned because of their resistance to the state. As a result, many of them were difficult to locate and highly reluctant to speak with me.

In Germany, I interviewed formerly violent individuals from the Red Army Faction and Bewegung 2. Juni. The Red Army Faction was the most violent or ga ni za tion in Germany after World War II and responsible for the killing of dozens of people between 1971 and 1993. Bewegung 2. Juni was active during the same period, but since it killed only two people, it received much less attention. Although they are no longer persecuted by the state, the members of these groups receive a lot of media attention, especially related to attacks that remain unresolved (for example, the assassination of German attorney general Siegfried Buback). These individuals were also very difficult to locate, and highly reluctant to speak with me. Dozens refused to be interviewed for this study, but those who agreed gave me the chance to ask questions about their actions for many hours.

The nonviolent individuals I interviewed in Germany are from the Socialist German Student Union and Kommune 1. These groups developed as part of the worldwide student revolts that broke out at the end of the 1960s, and became the major drivers of these protests in Germany. While many of these individuals were under surveillance during and after the student revolts, they were living ordinary lives at the time I conducted field research. Most were even mentioned in the phone book, which made it easy to locate and establish contact with them. With the exception of one individual, none asked to remain anonymous.

Before elaborating on the analysis of these individuals, the following pages further introduce the subject of this book: they critique the existing literature on political violence, develop several working hypotheses that serve as an analytical framework for this study, and define violent and nonviolent activism.

Studying Beliefs Related to Political Violence

This book contributes to the study of beliefs related to political behavior. Beliefs can be considered the set of lenses through which information concerning the physical and social environment is received (Holsti 1962: 245), and have been a powerful tool to understand political behavior. Focusing on the actors’ perspective on the world, beliefs contribute to studies of structural factors, which cannot by themselves explain human behavior (see Young 1996: 395). As Jonathan Renshon observes, "In the context of political decision making, leaders react not to an objective reality but to a subjective reality that is filtered through their belief system" (Renshon 2008: 822, my italics).

The study of beliefs originated in the field of foreign policy analysis (George 1969; Holsti 1962; Leites 1953). Although it has spread to other fields including public opinion or voting behavior (Caplan 2007; Page and Shapiro 1992), there are only a few studies about the beliefs connected to political violence.¹ Due to this gap, we have very little knowledge about the subjective reality to which violent individuals react, and about whether the external categories presented by existing studies of political violence actually matter from the actors’ own perspective. This gap not only prevents us from understanding the rich microlevel mechanisms that drive the people who engage in political violence, but also from comparing the motivations underlying political violence as opposed to other types of behavior, such as nonviolent activism.

This book explores the beliefs of violent individuals and compares them with the beliefs of nonviolent individuals. This exploration suggests that, unlike what is widely assumed, the motivations underlying extremist behavior such as violence and mainstream behavior such as nonviolent activism appear to be rather similar. Specifically, I find that both violent and nonviolent individuals act in response to particular beliefs about aggressive state behavior. This implies that rather than being crazy religious fanatics, violent individuals are not that different from nonviolent individuals and engage in very similar reasoning processes.

These findings put into perspective existing explanations of political violence that apply external categories of research. In the following paragraphs, I elaborate on these theories and explain how this book contributes to them by investigating the beliefs of violent individuals. Rather than offering a comprehensive overview of the vast literature on political violence, I focus on theories that continue being examined in the major political science publications and that speak to the belief systems literature by implying that violent individuals hold certain beliefs (although they do not explicitly explore the subjective reality of violent individuals). I proceed by providing brief introductions to each theory, commenting on its limits, and explaining the contribution of this book.

Cultural-Psychological Theories

Cultural-psychological theories are arguably the most famous type of theories about the beliefs of violent individuals. Focusing on religion, they imply that violent individuals are motivated by religious beliefs.

In The Roots of Muslim Rage, Bernard Lewis (1990) argues that Islam, like other religions has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence—an argument Samuel Huntington later developed into the theory of the clash of civilizations (1993). In spite of their publicity, cultural-psychological theories have been widely disputed. On the one hand, the claim that religion matters to violence has been supported. As Jessica Stern has pointed out, violent individuals are spiritually intoxicated and engage in violence to ‘cleanse’ the world of ‘impurities’ (2003: 281; cf. Juergensmeyer 2009).

On the other hand, recent findings have questioned the role of religious beliefs. Large-scale political violence is not disproportionately common or deadly in Muslim lands, Fish, Jensenius, and Michel (2010: 1342) conclude in a statistical analysis building on Monty Marshall’s Major Episodes of Political Violence dataset. At the same time, the authors note that this finding does not provide information about the motivations of individuals (1342). In a statistical analysis of two distinct datasets and an independent sample of Muslims and Jews, Canetti et al. (2010) have explored these motivations. They find that religion does not directly encourage individuals to take up arms, and that the relationship between religion and political violence only holds true when mediated by deprivations and psychological resource loss (575).

While these findings contribute insight, we still lack much hard evidence on whether a relationship between Islam and political violence really exists (Fish et al. 2010: 1327). More specifically, we cannot explain why only some people who believe in Islam take up arms, or why the majority of Muslims do not take up arms: As Canetti et al. criticize, on the individual level, existing empirical accounts are both sparse and conflicting (575).

This book contributes new empirical insight at the individual level, and suggests that the main assumption of cultural-psychological theories is incorrect: investigating the beliefs of violent individuals who are Muslim, my analysis shows that they are not motivated by religious beliefs, but rather by other beliefs about state aggression. By contrast, it shows that beliefs about Islam may help encourage individuals to engage in nonviolent activism instead. The analysis adds analytical rigor to existing studies in the field of cultural-psychological theories by exploring the beliefs of both violent and nonviolent Muslims, and of violent and nonviolent non-Muslims. Moreover, it explores belief systems, which sheds light on the interrelationships by which different types of factors may motivate actors to engage in violence, building on Canetti et al.’s observation that the motivations underlying violence are complex.

Environmental-Psychological Theories

Environmental-psychological theories focus on the environment in which violence occurs. Much of this literature focuses on economic deprivation, implying that violent individuals are motivated by beliefs that they suffer from environmental strains, such as economic hardships.

Early research in this field suggests that people who take up arms against their states are motivated by feelings of frustration related to perceived deprivation and that rebellions come to be when people cannot bear the misery of their lot (Victoroff 2005: 19). Building on John Dollard et al.’s frustration-aggression hypothesis (1939) and Alexis de Tocqueville’s work on people’s dissatisfaction with their living situation ([1835] 2000), Ted Robert Gurr argues that the proposed relation between perceived deprivation and the frustration concept in frustration-anger-aggression theory … provides a rationale for a more general definition of magnitude of violence and a more precise specification of what it comprises (2011: 9).

Related recent analyses have presented an ambiguous picture. Economic conditions and education are largely unrelated to participation in, and support for, terrorism, according to a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in Hezbollah activities in Lebanon (Krueger and Maleckova 2002, 2003). The authors conclude that having a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary school or higher education is positively associated with participation in Hezbollah and that Israeli Jewish settlers who attacked Palestinians in the West Bank in the early 1980s were overwhelmingly from high-paying occupations (2002: abstract). In their 2011 statistical analysis of surveys from Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines, Berman et al. reach a similar conclusion: The data rule out a positive correlation between unemployment and violence for all three countries: if there is an opportunity-cost effect, it is not dominant in any of them (2011: 498; cf. Mousseau 2011; Blair et al. 2013). On the other hand, Meierrieks and Gries (2012) have provided new support for environmental-psychological explanations (2012). Based on an analysis of panel data for 160 countries from 1970 to 2007, they show that there is a causal relationship between terrorism and growth that is heterogeneous over time and across space. They conclude: "Growth unidirectionally Granger-causes terrorism for the Cold War era, while terrorism unilaterally Granger-causes growth for the post-Cold War era (102, my italics). Similarly, James Piazza’s analysis of data from the Minority at Risk Project concludes that economic deprivation matters: The empirical results show that countries that permit their minority communities to be afflicted by economic discrimination make themselves more vulnerable to domestic terrorism in a substantive way" (2011: 350).

Although not refuting the frustration-aggression hypothesis, these results suggest that its significance is limited, and that the relationship between environmental strains and violence remains unclear. In the words of Piazza, environmental-psychological explanations remain inconclusive (2011: 339). A major limitation is that environmental-psychological theories are rather static, implying that if environmental conditions change, the frequency with which political violence occurs will change as well. Such a linear causal relation can be refuted with reference to observations that the majority of people living in poverty do not take up arms (Victoroff 2005), that individuals as well as groups have embraced or renounced violence when environmental conditions stayed the same (Ashour 2007; Wickham 2002), or that individuals of the same group came from different environments (Ansari 1984; Ibrahim 1980).

This book shows that, as opposed to what is expected from environmental-psychological theories, violent individuals are not motivated by beliefs about environmental conditions, such as economic deprivation. Investigating the beliefs of violent individuals from two opposite environments—an authoritarian state suffering from economic hardship (Egypt) and a wealthy democracy (Germany)—the analysis shows that individuals instead decide to take up arms in response to the belief that the state is aggressive. By contrast, it shows that, surprisingly, individuals who engage in nonviolent activism in the same environments may be motivated by beliefs about economic deprivation.

Group Theories

Much of the recent research has examined the role of violent groups. This research emphasizes that individuals usually engage in violence against the state as part of groups, rather than as lone-wolf actors. This implies that violent individuals are motivated by beliefs about their groups.

Although much of this literature focuses on groups rather than individuals, some analysts in this field have also explored how groups may motivate individuals to turn to violence. For example, they have pointed to sociopsychological mechanisms according to which individuals first get in contact and are then absorbed by violent groups. Based on Marc Sageman’s famous analysis of the biographies of 172 individuals, for instance, it has been suggested that terrorism is an emergent quality of the social networks formed by alienated young men who become transformed into fanatics yearning for martyrdom and eager to kill (2004: vii). Albert Bandura has specified the psychological aspect of this theory by pointing to mechanisms of moral disengagement in which violent individuals abandon the moral standards adopted during their earlier course of socialization and begin to refute moral arguments, referring to a higher level of morality, derived from communal concerns (Bandura 1998: 161, 165).

More recently, Omar McDoom’s statistical analysis of 3,426 residents of a Rwanda community has provided support for the social aspect of this theory by showing that violent individuals are likely to live either in the same neighbourhood or in the same household as other participants (2013: 1). Specifically, as the number of violent to nonviolent individuals in an individual’s neighbourhood or household increases, the likelihood of this individual’s participation also increases. Three studies by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges on Palestinians and Jews have further specified psychological aspects according to which violent individuals are motivated by moral commitments to collective sacred values (2009: 115).

The finding that violent groups matter is widely accepted. In spite of the insight gained from the mentioned works, focusing on groups cannot explain the behavior of the individuals participating in those groups. Specifically, group theories leave open the questions of why certain individuals join violent groups as opposed to others who have access to the same groups; why certain but not other members of violent groups carry out particular attacks; or why certain members sometimes break away from their violent groups. Often, group theories also fail to consider that nonviolent groups may be interacting with the same individuals, operating in the same environment, and against the same targets.

As opposed to what is expected from group theories, this book shows that violent individuals are not motivated by beliefs about violent groups. Specifically, I find that the beliefs violent individuals hold about their groups do not matter to their decisions to take up arms. Moreover, I find that, surprisingly, nonviolent individuals may hold the same beliefs about violent groups. In particular, the nonviolent individuals I interviewed also hold beliefs that they interacted with members of violent groups. This indicates that they also had group access, but as opposed to what is expected from group theories, this did not motivate them to take up arms.

Psychopathological Theories

Although psychopathological theories have been widely discarded, they deserve attention because they continue to be quoted by numerous analysts of political violence and by the news. Specifically, psychopathological theories have been dedicated