So wie hier durch Logik und Wissenschaft der Mythos des Vampirs entzaubert wurde, entzaubert der Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Princeton Alan Krueger durch Empirie die noch immer herrschende Vorstellung, dass die Ursachen für Terrorismus in den (schlechten) Lebensumständen der entsprechenden Bevölkerung liegen. Der Terrorist wählt eben nicht aus Armut, Hunger und mangelnder Ausbildung als letzte Konsequenz das Selbstmordattentat, wie z. B. Laura Bush glaubt: “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror. A lasting victory in the war against terror depends on educating the world’s children.”
Basis dieser Thesen sind u.a. Untersuchungen von Alan Krueger und einem Kollegen in den frühen 1990er Jahren in 543 Landkreisen in Deutschland rechtsextreme Gewalttaten betreffend sowie Untersuchungen über die Einstellung der Bevölkerung in Ländern des Nahen Ostens zu Gewalt und den Anschlägen von islamistischen Selbstmordattentätern. Die beiden Forscher fanden heraus, “that poor economic conditions do not seem to motivate people to participate in hate crimes… We found that the unemployment rate, the level of wages, wage growth, and average education were all unrelated to the incidence of crimes against foreigners”.
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To investigate the role of societal factors, I assembled data on the country of origin and target of hundreds of significant international terrorist attacks from 1997 to 2003, using information from the State Department. I found that many socioeconomic indicators—including illiteracy, infant mortality, and GDP per capita—are unrelated to whether people from one country become involved in terrorism. Indeed, if anything, measures of economic deprivation, at a country level, have the opposite effect from what the popular stereotype would predict: international terrorists are more likely to come from moderate-income countries than poor ones.
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Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer, has written a book titled Understanding Terror Networks. He found that a high proportion of members of al-Qaeda were college educated (close to 35 percent) and drawn from skilled professions (almost 45 percent). Research on members of the Israeli extremist group, Gush Emunim, that Malecková and I conducted, also pointed in the same direction. Perhaps most definitively, the Library of Congress produced a summary report for an advisory group to the CIA titled, “The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?” which also reached this conclusion—two years before 9/11.
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The evidence suggests that terrorists care about influencing political outcomes. They are often motivated by geopolitical grievances. To understand who joins terrorist organizations, instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose an extremist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead, they are people who care so fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.
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