Illustrating Field-Based Research: “Will To Fight” On The Isis Frontline And Elsewhere
Providing the scientific foundations for interventions to prevent or parry violent extremism requires qualitative fieldwork (Horgan, 2012) to discover what people believe and do (versus prior suppositions, Sommers, 2019) that is then deeply integrated into theory and tested with rigorous methods (Freilich & LeFree, 2016; Atran, Axelrod, Davis, & Fischhoff, 2017). It also requires attention to decision makers’ perceived policy priorities, as support for terrorism research exists only because of a pressing public need. Indeed, it is arguable that terrorism per se is primarily a policy-driven notion and political strategy that otherwise has no conceptual depth (not a “natural kind” in any scientifically meaningful sense).
Of course, scientists must retain strong independence to avoid co-option by bureaucratic or political interests. [endnoteRef:1] [1: The lion’s share of DoD’s budget for social science and “cultural knowledge” went to programs like the Human Terrain System Military Intelligence Program, which sought to embed experts in combat units to “provid[e] social and cultural decision-making insight to operational commanders” (DoD, 2011). By September 2014, it had cost more than $700 million for efforts generally shunned by academia and deemed ineffective or worse by many military commanders (DoD, 2010; Gezari, 2015). Another problem is that much USG survey work in conflict zones is hired out to foreign (local) contractors whose procedures can be dubious (e. g. , conducting and discussing surveys with many people at once), “discovering” what they think USG wants to hear. ]
To illustrate the importance of policy to basic research in this domain, and of research as critical to informed policy, I present a series of recent behavioral and brain studies with frontline combatants, radical populations, and more typical Westerners. Our team’s research in the field generally begins with interviewing political and military leaders to understand how elites may be thinking, and to gain access to participants in areas we want to cover (while also gauging how to avoid elite influence and expectation regarding the research). After spending time in the field with participants -- including fighters, militants, and would-be volunteers for combat --for the days, weeks or years needed to establish trust, we carry out semi-structured interviews to generate hypotheses about behavior. Next, we design experiments and measures to initially test in laboratory settings or online, where we can carefully control procedures and monitor results, Then, we return to the field to more rigorously probe the participants. If field results prove robust, we follow up for generality with experimentally-designed mass surveys involving populations from different regions and cultures.
In September 2014, U. S. President Barack Obama endorsed the declaration of his national intelligence director: “We underestimated ISIL and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army. . . . It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable” (Payne, 2014). This shortfall may arise, in part, from undervaluing certain aspects of what may be considered the nonutilitarian dimension of human conflict, which combatants themselves deem “sacred” or “spiritual. ” To examine this dimension of intergroup conflict, we developed measures based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with two groups on the USG list of terrorist organizations in northern Iraq in February–March 2015: captured ISIS fighters, and combatants of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) fighting ISIS. Next, we tested and refined these measures with large-sample online studies in Spain to understand people’s willingness to make costly sacrifices for their groups and their values. We followed with a quantitative field study in February–March 2016 on the same frontline with Peshmerga (Kurdish Regional Government forces), Iraqi army Kurds, and Arab Sunni militia. Further online studies in Spain with Western Europeans then examined cognitive mechanisms underlying the frontline results.
From the studies, three interrelated factors appear critical to willingness to kill and sacrifice: (1) commitment to non-negotiable sacred values to which the group’s actors are wholly fused; (2) readiness to forsake commitment to kin for those values; (3) perceived spiritual strength of one’s own group versus foes. Consider the measures and results for each factor:
To measure sacredness, we probed willingness to trade-off values in exchange for material benefits, whether for individual or collective gain. Absolute refusal to contemplate such trade-offs was taken as an indicator of a sacred value. For identity fusion, participants were asked to indicate their relationship to a number of groups. They were shown a series of increasingly overlapping circles, one of which represents them, and the other, a given group (Swann et al. , 2012). Respondents who picked the figure displaying completely overlapping circles were considered fused with the group, leading to a dichotomous measure.
Our previous online and field studies in North Africa and Western Europe indicated that commitment to sacred values and identity fusion independently affect willingness to make costly sacrifices; however, their interaction maximizes such willingness under real or perceived threat (Figure 2). For example, among Moroccans from two city neighborhoods with a history of support for militant jihad (Jemaa Mezuak in Tetuan and Sidi Moumen in Casablanca), individual testing indicated that about 30 percent were “devoted actors” who viewed strict imposition of Islamic law, or Sharia, as a sacred value, and identified closely with a kin-like group with which they were fused. They were also the most willing to kill and die for Islamic law. A parallel study of Spaniards identified only 12 percent as devoted actors willing to sacrifice for democracy, and few willing to kill, die, or forsake family, even when reminded of threats by ISIS and al-Qaeda. Those most likely to make costly sacrifices, however, saw democracy as a sacred value and also identified closely with a kin-like group of friends (Sheikh, Gómez, & Atran, 2016).
In February–March 2016 we interviewed 60 combatants near the village of Kudilah, the first engagement in the offensive to retake Mosul, the largest ISIS-controlled city (Atran, 2016a). At Kudilah, some 90 ISIS fighters with no heavy weaponry managed to prevent a sustained advance by several hundred coalition forces of Arab Sunni militia, Iraqi army, and Kurdish Peshmerga, aided by U. S. and German advisers and repeated air strikes. This occurred despite more than 50 ISIS fighters killed in the battle, including a score of inghamasi (“who plunge deep,” suicide attackers trained to piere enemy positions and cover retreat), yelling that they would die so that “The Caliphate endures and expands!” Many who fought in the battle, including some who had been fighting in various wars since the 1960s, told us this was the fiercest combat of their lives.
We found that unsolicited responses (controlling and monitoring for possibilities of deception) of captured ISIS fighters, and PKK fighters holding the line against ISIS, regarding what is sacred and spiritual were echoed and validated by other frontline combatants.
We also tested our measures of sacred values and fusion online with people in Spain (N = 816). Participants responded to measures of fusion with country (Spain) and democracy as a sacred value. Under a threat condition highlighting the 2004 Madrid train bombings, an interaction of identity fusion and sacred values characteristic of “devoted actors” appeared: Devoted actors in the threat condition displayed the strongest willingness to make costly sacrifices.
Previous studies of combat soldiers stress devotion to comrades over cause (Stouffer, Suchman, De Vinney, Star, & Williams, 1949; Smith, 1983; Moskos, 1975; Whitehouse et al. , 2014) as do online studies of Western Europeans (Gómez et al. , 2016). However, this may be otherwise when combatants consider the cause sacred. In in-depth interviews with (captured) ISIS and PKK (Kurdish Marxist) combatants in Iraq in 2015, some told of how they had to give up their families to fight for their cause (Islamic Caliphate, Kurdish homeland, Atran 2016b); and in fact, ISIS has divulged children’s public executions of parents for opposing the Caliphate and its leader (Taylor & Moyer, 2016; Ahlul Bayt News Agency, 2016).
From a material and evolutionary perspective, one should prioritize kin or kin-like groups over abstract ideals. Yet our studies indicate that combatants make painful decisions when forced to choose between value and group (Atran, 2016b). All combatants were devoted actors who regarded relevant values as sacred and were fused with at least one larger group: comrades, Muslim Ummah, kin-like group of friends (often comrades in arms), Iraqi people, or their own groups (Peshmerga, Iraqi Army Kurds, Sunni Arab militia). Most were also fused with their families (> 90 percent for all three groups). We pitted their two most important groups against their two most important sacred values. Most chose at least one value over a group (86 percent), with more than half choosing at least one value over their families (59 percent). Combatants scored more highly on the costly sacrifice scale if they chose the value over the group (Figure 3).
The apparent preference for value over kin by devoted actors, at least in some contexts, supports the thesis that humans may form their strongest (and potentially most expansive) political and religious ties by subordinating devotion to kin to a more abstract ideal. Thus, a founding parable of monotheistic religions involves Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice beloved progeny to signal devotion to a sacred value (absolute commitment to God). The very term Islam, or “submission,” refers to subordinating tribal and all other prior group affinities to God’s message. Historically, willingness to sacrifice family and tribe was arguably critical to construction of larger groups founded on political principles (Fukuyama, 2012).
Although the term “spiritual formidability” may have religious connotations to some, it more properly refers to nonmaterial strength. In the frontline and online studies, we find that relative spiritual formidability of groups, compared to relative physical formidability, is more related to willingness to sacrifice. Using techniques to judge physical formidability (Holbrook & Fessler, 2013) that assessed the perceived strength of various combatant groups in Iraq, we found that both avowedly religious ISIS fighters and avowedly secular PKK fighters (the only force that held fast against the ISIS onslaught in summer 2014) disregarded consideration of ingroup and outgroup physical formidability. They argued during our initial experiments in early 2015 that most important was spiritual formidability (ruhi bi ghiyrat, in both Arabic and Kurdish, or “spirituality with bravery” to defend what is most cherished, which they recurrently described in terms of “strength of belief in what we are fighting for” and “what is in our heart”). We then developed dynamic measures of physical formidability that we adapted to spiritual formidability This was to compare the effect of the ingroups’ perceptions of their own physical versus spiritual formidability on willingness to fight, as well as the ingroups’ perceptions of the physical versus spiritual formidability on the willingness to fight of various outgroups, whether friend or foe.
Frontline combatants’ perception of spiritual formidability positively correlated with willingness to make costly sacrifices, including: dying, letting their family suffer, killing civilians, suicide attack, and torturing women and children. Combatants also judged the U. S. to be high in physical formidability but low spiritually, while judging ISIS low physically but high spiritually. A Kurdish fighter typically remarked: “They [ISIS] are weak now because they have used up their resources but their fighters don't retreat even if the battle is lost. ”[endnoteRef:2] [2: According to General William Turner, Deputy Commander of the U. S. -led coalition offensive against ISIS in Mosul: “ISIS as a whole is a cornered force. . . . They are fierce fighters, there is a core of ISIS fighters that are fighting to death” (ARA News, 2017). ]
In follow-up online studies in Spain, participants (N = 1,434) who perceived ISIS as spiritually strong were least willing to sacrifice for democracy and support the country in an armed intervention. When participants were asked to estimate the spiritual formidability of Spain versus ISIS, they invoked negative emotions (fear, panic, defenselessness, anger) when perceiving ISIS as spiritually stronger than the ingroup. Together, the Spanish findings suggest that perception of an adversary’s great spiritual strength relative to one’s own may hamper and deter willingness to sacrifice in opposing the adversary. In brief, we find that the relative spiritual but not physical formidability of groups predicts willingness to make costly sacrifices for combatants and online noncombatants.
The upshot is that understanding will to fight in the face of lethal danger may remain imponderable—and attendant security challenges seemingly intractable—as long as we view such actions through a narrow lens of instrumental rationality. This optic tends to disregard the immediate and remote consequences of actions motivated by what Darwin (1871) deemed “highly esteemed, even sacred” spiritual and moral virtues that “give an immense advantage” to one group over another when possessed by devoted actors who “by their example excite . . . in a high degree the spirit” in others to sacrifice self for cause and comrades, for ill or good.
In 2017-2018, we followed up with studies of young men coming out from under ISIS rule in the Mosul region. We first asked senior policymakers in the U. S. , UK, French and German governments what questions they most wanted answered with help from social science research. Broadly, they responded: What do people think of ISIS? What do they think of a Unified Iraq? What political future do they want? What would they tolerate?
In the field, most people we interviewed and tested initially embraced ISIS as “the Revolution” (al-Thawra). Although many came to reject ISIS’s brutality, ISIS had imbued about half of our sample of the present generation of young Sunni Arab men with its two most sacred values, measured in terms of willingness to fight and die for them: strict belief in Sharia and belief in a Sunni Arab Homeland, as opposed to a unified Iraq. Moreover, those who believe in these values expressed significantly greater willingness to fight and die than supporters of a unified Iraq. ISIS may have lost its state but not necessarily the allegiance of people in the region to its core values. Neither have underlying conditions of political and confessional conflict that caused people to initially embrace ISIS changed appreciably (cf. Johnston et al. , 2016).
In addition, we found no significant support for democracy across our post-ISIS study population. In the West, elections under universal suffrage represent a late stage in development of liberal democracy. Without prior establishment of liberal institutions (independent judiciary, freedom of expression, guarantees for minorities, etc. ), elections are apt to lead to a tyranny of the majority, which is how Iraq’s Sunni minority views the Shia majority that won power under U. S. -sponsored elections (Atran, 2015b).
