Was state senator Obama right that poverty causes terrorism?
BY JOSHUA KEATING
SLATE
With the 12th anniversary of 9/11 last week, several people are sharing a scanned page from the Sept. 19, 2001, issue of the Hyde Park Herald, featuring reactions to the attacks from several politicians, including one State Sen. Barack Obama. Obama wrote:
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| President Obama |
The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair. . . . We will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe — children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.
The theme of terrorism as a symptom of poverty was a popular one from that era. George W. Bush also said that “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror.” But the argument that poor and uneducated people are more likely to become terrorists is more controversial than you might think.
The 9/11 hijackers and plotters, after all, were predominantly educated men from comfortable backgrounds, an extremely wealthy one in Osama bin Laden’s case. But the causal relationship has also been difficult to demonstrate on a more general level.
A widely cited 2002 paper by economists Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova (also summarized in a New Republic article) found that support for attacks against Israeli targets among Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza did not decrease among those who were more educated and wealthier. They also found that “a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary school or higher education is positively associated with participation in Hezbollah,” the Lebanese military group. Israeli settlers who attacked Palestinians also tended to be wealthier than average. A 2004 study by the Harvard economist Alberto Abadie found that this was also true at the country level: Terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries.
But there may also be another side to the story. The political scientist Ethan Bueno de Mesquita argues that economic conditions affect terrorist recruitment in a more subtle way. Terrorist groups are more likely to want to recruit people with useful skills; in other words, those with more education and success in the labor market. But it becomes easier for them to do so during economic downturns, when there are fewer nonterrorist opportunities available.
And indeed, a 2011 study using microlevel data on the Palestinian economy found “evidence of the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists, and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit better educated, more mature and more experienced suicide terrorists, who in turn attack more important Israeli targets.” A recent country-level analysis by three German economists found evidence that “education may fuel terrorist activity in the presence of poor political and socio-economic conditions, whereas better education in combination with favorable conditions decreases terrorism.”
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