He is professor and chair of Sociology and Legal Studies and is co-director of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society. Among his many media appearances in the past few weeks, he writes on the perfect storm of circumstance and contingencies in homegrown terrorism.
Here is an excerpt:
How terrorism grows at home
by
Lorne
Dawson
The
Globe
and
Mail
Published
Tuesday,
Apr.
23
2013
"In the immediate aftermath of the capture of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Friday night, President Barack Obama gave voice to the questions everyone was asking: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence? … Did they receive any help?”
This is the challenge of “homegrown” terrorism. Why would young men like Dzhokhar, who by all reports was well integrated in his adopted homeland, to which he had come as a child, turn on his fellow citizens? He and his older brother, Tamerlan, may have experienced some difficulties growing up as Chechen refugees in America, but nothing that would seem to distinguish them from thousands of other children of immigrants.
We may never have a fully satisfactory answer, but the comparison of many cases of radicalization involving homegrown terrorism points to some similarities we need to explore.
At the highest level of generality, we must recognize that homegrown terrorism is a product of the new social conditions in which we all live. Obviously, homegrown terrorism is a product of globalization. It’s born of the unprecedented movement of peoples around the world, the ability of immigrants to stay in regular contact with people and issues in their homelands, and the capacity to spread the messages fuelling terrorism with relative ease over the Internet...
... In the end, many contingent factors will determine if anyone radicalizes, let alone commits an act of terrorism. In recognizing this, we need to be honest about our own lives. Our careers and marriages often are the result of happenstance, the result of meeting the right person or being in the right situation at the right time. Such is also the case in the biographies of terrorists and, consequently, it’s a perfect storm of factors that explains why any individual ultimately decides to plant bombs and kill innocent civilians.
Some of these contingencies will emerge as we learn what happened to the Tsarnaev brothers, and we’ll miss an important opportunity to prevent other bombings if we simply demonize them."