Staircase to Terrorism
A more sophisticated model is provided by Georgetown University psychology professor Fathali M. Moghaddam (2005), who developed the “Staircase to Terrorism” as a metaphor for the process of violent radicalisation. Moghaddam’s metaphor is of a staircase housed in a building where everyone lives on the ground floor, but where an increasingly small number of people ascend to the higher floors, and very few reach the top of the building. The “staircase” narrows as it ascends from the ground floor and fewer and fewer people reach each of the five successive floors.
Feelings of discontent and perceived adversity form the foundation of the staircase and the fuel for initially setting out on the path to terrorism. The ground floor is heavily populated by those who perceive some form of injustice or deprivation. Those who wish to do something about it climb to the first floor. The second floor, not as populated, accommodates those who, having found no solutions to their problems, displace their aggression onto some enemy. The third floor harbours those fewer people who join a group facilitating a kind of moral engagement before they ascend to the fourth floor, where “recruitment to terrorist organisations takes place”. Then, finally, the fifth floor, where they are trained to “sidestep inhibitory mechanisms” and sent to kill. “As individuals climb the staircase”, Moghaddam writes, “they see fewer and fewer choices, until the only possible outcome is the destruction of others, or oneself, or both”. Once again, the model was designed with a specific purpose in mind, in this case explaining suicide bombing, and it is entirely possible that the five stages cannot be generalised to a wide universe of cases.
Extracted from the book
“What does Radicalisation Look Like? Four Visualisations of Socialisation into Violent Extremism”
Fecha de publicación:
12/2016
Author:
Diego Muro, Lecturer in International Relations, University of St Andrews and Associate Senior Researcher, CIDOB__