Roula Khalaf has a great piece leading today’s FT about a new rehabilitation program underway in Saudi Arabia for former jihadis. One beneficiary of the program is Abu Suleiman (not his real name), a 33 year old who works in equity research. “But,” says Khalaf, “he has a secret: for the past year the Saudi authorities have been paying his family $800 a month while they work on re-educating him not to be a jihadi”. Khalaf continues:
The de-radicalisation programme uses a mix of heavy religious and psychological education on the “good belief in Islam” to rehabilitate militants. Chosen candidates are plucked from the Saudi prison system, where they enjoy few rights and are sometimes tortured. They are subjected to six to 10 weeks of de-brainwashing in a programme involving 100 official clerics and 30 professionals, including psychologists. Their families are paid a monthly stipend of up to $1,500 to forestall any al-Qaeda networks from paying relatives to keep them on side. Prisoners deemed worthy of graduation are then sometimes assisted in finding jobs and even wives. “They settle down when they marry,” says Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, chairman of the rehabilitation committee.
What’s interesting about the Saudi approach is that it focuses on social networks rather than on ideology – a point made emphatically by David Kilcullen, an Australian counter-insurgency specialist on secondment to the US State Department, in a New Yorker article by George Packer last December.
Kilcullen commented:
“After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying ‘The problem is Islam’, I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate … People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.”
Packer continues:
“[Kilcullen] noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert … are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates”.
Whether it’s attempts to counter-radicalisation or efforts to prevent anti-social behaviour (see the post directly below this one), the challenge for governments feeling their way towards a new theory of influence is the same: to develop a much fuller understanding of the role of networks and ‘clans‘ in determining human behaviour.
