Excerpt

In the aftermath of any terrorist act, our instinct is to try to make sense of the brutality by assigning a person’s or a group’s violent radicalization to one or two probable causes: religious extremism and economic disparity, for example.

If we could only find a simple cause, our thinking goes, we might find a simple solution—blocking the influx of potentially dangerous ideas and people, or sending more military power to excise terrorist strongholds. 

Such simplifications help us cope and make for powerful political messages, but it’s clear that no single factor can explain violent radicalization. Inevitably, such narrow-sighted reactions only make the problem evolve into a different, and potentially more dangerous, beast.

Welcome to complex social systems, where the interactions of many individuals immersed in particular socioeconomic circumstances lead to the emergence of sometimes surprising social phenomena, from fashion trends to political movements, from conspiracy theories to financial crises, and from religious rituals to jihads. Complexity science can help us understand the underlying social systems from which these problems emerge; we should let it guide us in developing a thoughtful, science-based policy for dealing with them.

What Drives a Terrorist?

Decades of research have, thus far, not revealed any common psychopathological symptoms among terrorists. They appear to want some of the same things most of us want: recognition from their peers and communities and better lives for the people they care about.

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