A Disregarded Component
It is not controversial to state that spending on military solutions in the realm of counter-terrorism is gigantic in scale. One only needs to look at a research paper from the Brown University, Watson Institute’s Costs of War Project, published in 2019, which found that the United States was obligated to spend an estimated $6.4 trillion through the 2020 fiscal year to cover budgetary costs for wars engaged in since 9/11 (many of which were launched as part of a counter-terrorism initiative). The same institute also published another report in 2019 illustrating that the blood toll exacted for such wars from 2001 to 2019 totalled a ‘direct war’ death count of 770,000-801,000 individuals.
Despite the efforts of countries like the United States in the goal of countering terrorism – and all the military and intelligence agency resources devoted to it – we still see few signs of levels of terrorism declining in any meaningful way. Syria remains unstable, rife with militias as well as proxy forces of state actors and in dire need of rebuilding. And Afghanistan’s NATO-established government collapsed under the Taliban’s military campaign within weeks of the United States and its allies withdrawing, the terrorist organisation now administering the country as an ‘Emirate'.
Escaping the debates held around the morality and politics of militarily pursued objectives surrounding counter-terrorism, it is indisputable that the results of such efforts have not been what nations hoped they would be. After twenty years of states embarking on the journey of fighting terrorism – catalysed by the Twin Towers attack in September 2001 – current military tools have not adequately addressed the issue.
The question, then, is what potentially could work.
Preventing the spread of the language, narratives and ideas that get individuals to take up extremist causes could mitigate the need for weaponry to be used a tool of deradicalisation. The key goal of such a solution would be to prevent the spread of the economic, psychological, political and social conditions and narratives that feed the urge to take up arms in the first place.
Even if the power of the state is not used to work towards this aim, society en masse can work towards it by consuming, producing and distributing creative arts that address issues relevant to radicalisation and extremism. After all, it is hard to find someone who does not engage with video games, films, music or books; creative arts might represent the most democratically accessible tool available for society to use in deradicalisation.
To be sure that this is more than naive thinking, though, one would need to prove that using creative arts has a track record in countering terrorism. Awad M.S. Alyami from King Saud University found that an art therapy program for ex-jihadists, which has been operating since 2007 in the Mohammed Bin Nayef Center for Counseling and Care in Riyadh, had a 86.17% success rate and a 13.83% recidivism rate as of January 2015. Similarly, organisations such as the International Counter Terrorism Centre and the Royal United Services Institute have also suggested that media and terrorism have an intrinsic relationship with one another. While their focus is on the negative aspect of this relationship, it is clear that such a relationship could equally be cultivated into one where media is reverse engineered to facilitate deradicalisation.
For me, the utility of creative arts in deradicalisation and countering terrorism can be explained in the following terms.
Firstly, creative arts can be a component in understanding the personal stories that drive individuals on a journey of radicalisation (and away from such a journey). By creatively analysing the experiences of those who are drawn to more pernicious ideologies, society can figure out what emotional, material and cultural needs such individuals are turning to the fringes for.
Secondly, creative arts can be used to dispel problematic perceptions of adverse cultural, political and ethnic differences. By showing how diversity of thought and culture does not entail an inherent need for conflict, creative arts can challenge unnecessary socially constructed divisions between groups in society.
Finally, creative arts can oppose alarmist narratives and lies designed to turn groups in society on each other. As part of information warfare, authoritarian states and political actors have used social media and traditional media to try to engineer division. Creative arts can present a multi-modal – multiple expressions of communication such as writing, images and sound – tool that can thwart the growth in popularity of such narratives, thereby helping to prevent radicalisation and counter terrorism.