Breaking the ISIS Brand Counter Narrative Project: Understanding, Preventing, and Intervening in Militant Jihadi Terrorism and Violent Extremism

The content of this chapter describes the processes by which individuals become radicalized toward militant jihadi terrorism and ultimately join terrorist groups using ISIS recruitment and radicalization within ISIS as the focus of doing so. In doing so, it identifies steps that practitioners and policy makers can use to prevent and counter violent jihadist extremism by taking a nuanced approach that considers psychosocial vulnerabilities and environmental factors that contribute to radicalization. The case studies presented to illustrate these points are gleaned from the 240 interviews [1] with ISIS defectors, returnees, and imprisoned cadres interviewed by the first author, a research psychologist, in her role as director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and well as hundreds of terrorists from other groups. In the case of the ISIS interviews, with the interviewees’ consent, the interviews were video-recorded and cut to create short counter narrative clips that can be used as a powerful tool for challenging the beliefs that individuals who have been exposed to ISIS propaganda may hold. This chapter also focuses on the Internet campaigns that ICSVE has used to test various aspects of the counter narrative videos, revealing the best ways to utilize the counter narratives and to maximize their impact online. Given that ISIS has become notorious for its skill at Internet recruitment and creating high-quality propaganda videos, it is imperative that counter terrorism professionals are able to parallel their efforts in order to continue fighting them even after the territorial defeat of the Caliphate.

The Character of Adolescents

This chapter examines the character of adolescents. It is hard to say precisely how much the distinctive character of adolescents reflects a natural stage in the human maturation process and how much is the result of the intensive interaction with other teens that has become the norm in modern times. The safest bet is that it is a bit of both. With that framework in mind, the chapter first considers the distinctive qualities of teenagers that can reasonably be connected to the natural trajectory of human development, viewing this from a number of complementary vantage points. It then turns to the social setting of adolescence, where, as research psychologist Robert Epstein rightly points out, these teenage qualities have been given the opportunity to flourish and take root as never before.

On Barriers to Accessing Children’s Voices in School Based Research

In the research conducted since the inception of the CRC, relatively little theoretically-driven psychological work has been devoted to exploring the issue of children’s rights in classrooms and schools (Urinboyev, Wickenberg, & Leo, 2016). The purpose of this paper is to take a step back and hypothesize based on personal experience, as a research psychologist, the reasons for the relative absence of theoretically-driven empirical research. The motivation for this work stems from the following premises: Psychologists are naturally interested in studying children in a variety of domains. The school is one of the two most important domains in a child’s life; the other being the home environment. However, the study of children in school settings is controlled by school administrators and teachers. As Urinboyev et al. (2016, p. 536) state “some studies [have] found that there is a strong resistance among teachers to accept fully children as rights holders in many schools… .” Consequently, there are significant challenges for researchers in accessing children’s voices about matters that pertain to them in school settings.

Air Force Medical Personnel: Perspectives Across Deployment

Introduction Contingency operations during the past 18 years have exposed millions of U.S. military service members to numerous combat and operational stressors. Despite this, a relative dearth of literature has focused on the experiences of deployed military medical personnel. As such, the present study aimed to address this gap in the literature by conducting individual and small group interviews with Air Force medical personnel who had recently returned from a deployment to Iraq. Interviews targeted self-reported factors related to psychological risk and resiliency across the deployment cycle, while also seeking recommendations for future military medical personnel preparing for medical deployments. Materials and Methods Inductive thematic analyses were conducted on transcripts from 12 individual and structured group interviews conducted with recently deployed U.S. Air Force medical personnel (N = 28). An interview script consisting of 18 prompts was carefully developed based on the experiences of study personnel. Two team members (n = 1 research psychologist; n = 1 military medical provider) coded exemplars from interview transcripts. A third team member (research psychologist) reviewed coded exemplars for consistency and retained themes when saturation was reached. Results In total we report on 6 primary themes. Participants reported feeling prepared to conduct their mission while deployed but often felt unprepared for the positions they assumed and the traumas they commonly experienced. Most participants reported deployment to be a rewarding experience, citing leader engagement, and social support as key protective factors against deployment-related stressors. Finally, following deployment, participants largely reported positive experiences reintegrating with their families but struggled to reintegrate into their workplace. Conclusion Findings from the present study indicate that the military is largely doing a good job preparing Air Force medical providers to deploy. Results of the present study indicate that military medical personnel would benefit from: (1) increased predictability surrounding deployment timelines, (2) improved cross-cultural training, (3) advanced training for atypical injuries in unconventional patient populations, and (4) improvements in postdeployment workplace reintegration. The present research has the potential to positively impact the overall quality of life for deploying military service members and their families; while simultaneously highlighting the successes and shortfalls in the deployment process for U.S. military medical personnel.

ISIS in Their Own Words: Recruitment History, Motivations for Joining, Travel, Experiences in ISIS, and Disillusionment over Time – Analysis of 220 In-depth Interviews of ISIS Returnees, Defectors and Prisoners

Two hundred and twenty Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) defectors, returnees, and imprisoned ISIS cadres were in-depth interviewed by the author, a research psychologist working for the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) from 2015-2019. These interviews were conducted in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, the Balkans, Europe, and Central Asia with ISIS prisoners, returnees, and defectors. The purpose was to learn about their recruitment history, motivations for joining, travel, experiences inside the group, disillusionment over time, and defection, return or capture. This article reports on a sample of both male and female former ISIS members representing over 35 countries. It examines their demographics, contextual, and other qualitative variants regarding their psycho-social vulnerabilities and motivations for joining. It then discusses the influences and recruitment patterns drawing them into the group, their roles, experiences, and relationships inside it, variance in their will to fight and support violence, and their disillusionment and attempts to leave (when it occurs)—as well as their advice to others about joining. Although a convenience sample, the findings are consistent with other quantitative studies on ISIS and we believe highly informative on many important topics.

Is Emerging Adulthood a New Developmental Phase?

In 2000, Jeffrey Arnett, a developmental research psychologist, proposed a new phase of development that he called “emerging adulthood.” He delineated developmental challenges centered on identity, role exploration, and subjective experience and linked his observations to changes in the demographics and culture of contemporary society. This proposal elicited an extraordinary response in the research community, but the reaction among psychoanalysts has been tepid at best: developmental phases have not been amended for almost a century, and in some schools the very notion of such phases has been discredited. Adult development has historically attracted mostly lifespan psychoanalysts, and the concept of identity has never achieved full psychoanalytic status. But both adulthood and identity merit psychoanalytic legitimacy: adulthood because it looms in the mind as a meaningful endpoint that shapes earlier stages, and identity because it is a complex, organizing aspect of self-representation. The concept of emerging adulthood, too, has sufficient validity and heuristic value to be considered a developmental phase, provided we loosen our fixed ideas about what constitutes “developmental” and take a fresh look at the sweep of human development as it is shaping up in a transformed world.