This interview with Victor Asal, a professor and chair of public administration at Rockefeller College University of Albany, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews. Originally published 4.16.18.
My name is Victor Asal, I’m a professor of political science and Chair of Public Administration at Rockefeller College at the University of Albany, State University of New York.
I have three main areas of research. My first area of research is why people would go 400 miles out of their way to blow up people they’ve never met before. My other area of research is why people are discriminated against by the State or by societies. Why are some people treated badly just because of the color of their skin, their gender, or their sexual identity? I research all of those areas.
I will note that I believe there is a strong connection between people being treated badly, and people blowing things up. These two areas of research are definitely connected.
My third area of research is the area of pedagogy in political science. What are effective ways of teaching students about political concepts, about the theories of politics? Specifically in the areas that I research.
One of the things that I’ve found in my research is strong support for an argument that Ted Gurr made 47 years ago, about why men rebel. In that work, Gurr is making the argument that discrimination and oppression are critical in why people turn to violence.
There were a lot of people who disputed this and argued about this — but there's been growing literature that’s been focusing at the ethnic group level, that this is true, that this is one of the drivers of the use of political violence. I’ve been looking at this at the organizational level using a dataset called Minorities Risk Organizational Behavior dataset. That’s ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East and North Africa that claim to represent an ethnopolitical group, a minority group. From the analysis, some of them are violent, some of them are not violent.
Can you tell me who some of them are?
Hammas, Amal, the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), lots of different organizations, again some are violent, some are not, and some go back and forth.
It’s very clear in our analysis that State oppression of the organization is a key factor in these organizations turning to violence.
The other data set, that really is the genesis of myself and my colleague, Karl Rethemeyer here at U Albany, is the Big Allied and Dangerous dataset, which has the acronym BAAD. The BAAD Dataset is the dataset of organizations that have already turned to violence, that are using violence, and to be able to look at why some of them are so much more lethal than others, or use CBRN weapons [chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear ] in terrorism and such.
One of the interesting things that we’re finding is that organizations that are networked tend to be much more lethal than organizations that are not networked.
What do you mean by networked?
Having allies. For example, how many things have you gotten by knowing somebody?
Organizations that have connections tend to be more lethal, tend to get a lot more done, in a lot of different ways. Friends can be very, very helpful.
The other thing that we’re finding is that organizations that are lethal tend to generate more rivals. There’s a cycle process. But there's another issue here, that really drives these organizations, and that’s ideology. There’s some really interesting theoretical and case study work by a guy named Mark Juergensmeyer. He talks about how ideology can compel organizations and people to kill. Because they have this power of othering…
If I can build an ideology that makes me the good guy, and makes you evil, or not really even human — that enables me to say I can kill as many of you as I want, and I can kill as many civilians as I want. So ideology, particularly religious ideology, has an important impact. And the combination of religious and ethno-nationalist ideology has a very, very important impact on the behavior of these organizations.
The issue of killing civilians gets at one of the core debates we are having about terrorism. Because the term terrorism can be used in many ways. And there are lots of people who use the term terrorism to describe any violent organization they don’t like. Those are the terrorists, these are the good guys. And if you’re trying to study this phenomenon from an analytical, theoretical perspective, in my mind that is highly problematic. Because what that means is the definition of what we’re looking at is whether we like you or not. And that might be a great definition for seventh-grade friendships, but not a great definition for doing analysis.
And there are big debates about what, and how we should capture terrorism, even if we’re talking about it in an analytical fashion.
How would you like to define it [terrorism]?
So I define terrorism not by, if I like you or don’t like you. I define terrorism by, are you a political organization, with a political motivation, who is blowing people up, and specifically targeting civilians?
I will note that sometimes civilians get killed that are not being targeted, and in my mind, that is not the same thing as targeting civilians to kill civilians. It's one thing to shoot somebody in uniform, I don’t have to like it, especially if I’m wearing a uniform, but I would consider that very different behavior than blowing up a nursery school.
Let me very clear here, there's another distinction about terrorism, when people talk about terrorism, mostly what they’re talking about is non-state actors. There is a whole discussion about State terrorism. In my mind, if the State is intentionally targeting civilians, they are involved in State terrorism. But again, that's a controversial topic as well. Which gets back to my other focus, which is political discrimination and political oppression. When it comes to violence, I primarily look at non-state actors. Both insurgents and terrorist organizations, and what factors are pushing towards targeting civilians and other kinds of behavior. But States can be pretty awful. And if we want to compare which kind of organizations, between non-state actors and States, which have killed the most amount of civilians, there is no contest. Russia did a phenomenal job under Stalin slaughtering millions of people. Hitler. I mean, we could go on and on about the States. There have been States that have been lax, and have killed civilians by being lax, and not paying attention. And there have been States that have intentionally targeted civilians, who they meant to kill.