Wait long enough, and every terrorism or extremism think tank will disappoint you.
I began my career as a person who studies “terrorism” adjacent to the think tank space. At the cumbersomely named National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START for short), I worked for an organization funded by the US Departments of State and Homeland Security but that stressed its research independence. START was staffed by academics and practitioners, ex-soldiers and precocious 20somethings (hi), and a bunch of unpaid interns who did most of the work. (START internships are now paid.) In all of these respects, it was not unlike other Washington think tanks, where a motley crew of people got together to do research on a donor’s dime and produce policy-oriented products. That donor had political interests (very obvious ones in our case), and much as we had our own understandings of the world and varying levels of disagreement with US counterterrorism policy, our work was ultimately in service of a political project not of our own making.
I left START for largely personal reasons. At that time, my critiques of our work were along the lines of “gosh, we should really do more to capture terrorist activity in Latin America” and “the lack of good reporting on the Syrian Civil War leading to us systematically underestimating violence there seems…bad.” Many employees at the organization had similar concerns. These were methodological questions on the surface, but they masked deeper patterns of colonial knowledge production it would take me many more years to unveil, much less make sense of. Yes, it was self-evidently inefficient to produce data on Al-Shabaab with no Somali-speaking staff. What, however, did this reveal about deep-seated institutional priorities and whose knowledge counted as good enough for purposes of funding massive military operations in the horn of Africa? Why was the existence of government money for a dozen-ish simultaneous projects on CBRN terrorism and not for better access to Global South media reports not a product of policymaker ignorance, but evidence instead of counterterrorism as a tool of governance? What I’m getting at is the normative rot at the heart of the counterterrorism enterprise, which is ultimately about preserving hegemonic power structures and keeping no one safe except those who already are. This rot is inescapable; it persists by not being immediately apparent; and if good people stay in the CT/CVE business long enough, they end up questioning. They end up leaving. I’ve seen it happen again and again.
There’s an allure to having your expertise held up as valuable—sometimes even monetarily. I still find it difficult to ignore the rush that comes with an internationally recognized organization showing up in your inbox addressing you as someone whose claims are worth listening to. Maybe you’ve followed this organization for years. Maybe you’ve read and cited their staffers. I’m depersonalizing here because this is a general phenomenon, but I’m describing feelings I’ve felt and that were especially validating when I was still a grad student and not receiving validation from the institutions in my more immediate vicinity. When the German Federal Foreign Office invited me to give a presentation in the first month of my first post-PhD job, I felt like I’d made it. I mentioned structural white supremacy in my presentation and undid my ascension like a breeze hitting a house of cards.
This dynamic is easy to see, and predict, with government agencies. Any observer expects partisan interests to play a role. It is often easy to notice when these agencies do wrong. The trick with terrorism and extremism think tanks is the purported apoliticism. It’s in the naivety of a human rights or community-oriented mission statement. It’s also the hope that there are ways to do good in the counterterrorism and counterextremism space without dismantling the whole thing, because that’s hard and white comfort is a hell of a drug. And it’s knowing some of these think tank employees personally, the more time you spend doing this work, or coming to know them personally, and to know them as privately more radical than they are in their public work and hoping, naïvely, they will be able to make their organizations more just.
But these are explanations, not excuses.
Some examples are well-known, such as the implosion of the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR) in 2022 following its publication of an article alleging the “infiltration” of the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) field by “Antifa” and its director doubling down and also calling people antisemitic on Twitter. (Turns out he also had a history of threatening other researchers, especially younger women. Also the “Antifa is coming to get me” guy ended up bemoaning his cancelation on Quillette, proving everyone critic’s point for him. I digress.) The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has a long and well-documented history, predating the escalation of genocide in Gaza in late 2023, of targeting Black and Muslim activists in service of its political goals. Numerous organizations led by “formers”—individuals who purport to have left violent movements, usually on the far right—have fallen apart after their founders continued to espouse white nationalist views.
Other examples may be less obvious and call into question the possibility of doing counterterrorism or counterextremism work when the frameworks of “terrorism” and “extremism” themselves are state-dictated and state-enforced—which means, of course, that they perpetuate status quo power structures. An organization that self-describes as taking a “public health approach” as opposed to one relying on “surveillance, censorship, and carcerality” can nevertheless proudly announce its acquisition of a Department of Homeland Security grant to develop P/CVE programming for kindergarteners through fifth graders. Put differently, the same agency openly incarcerating brown migrant children has been deemed an ethical partner in educating children about racism and violence. What’s at stake here is not so much the content of the programming itself, which originated as a student project, but the judgment call that has rendered DHS funding for that project coherent with the organization’s stated anti-carceral agenda. And what’s revealed, in turn, is that there is no anti-carceral CVE.
(And even now, I’m feeling the urge to couch this assessment in caveats because I know people who work here! Explanation not excuse. Who does this serve!!!!)
Meanwhile, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague will readily publish articles with headlines such as “Hamas Global Jihad,” a word salad of a phrase that betrays startling ignorance of worldwide patterns of political violence for an organization that purports to be a leading research center on such matters. The Program on Extremism at George Washington University is still led by Lorenzo Vidino, a rampant Islamophobe whose racism is a matter of public record at this point yet whose organization continues to attract voluntary, uncompensated fellows alongside its permanent staff. On the matter of personnel, the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) was directed at its founding in 2008 by Peter Neumann, who is well-known for having targeted Muslim critics of CVE on Twitter with Islamophobic rhetoric. (Neumann no longer directs ICSR but is still affiliated with it.) Other think tanks and research centers are less Islamophobic but have toxic workplace cultures steeped in misogyny; I am refraining from naming examples here to protect people who have been subjected to this sort of abuse.
I began this post with the universalizing adjective “every,” which carries the risk of the one exception undermining the overall case. I would love to find that one exception. And, I have learned, and am continuing to learn over and over, that I’ve conflated “good” organizations with good singular people at those organizations. It is important to note that all of them employ folks genuinely wanting to do antiracist social justice work, especially young folks straight out of college who are optimistic and unfamiliar with organizational politics. I also don’t begrudge anyone just getting started with keeping their job for a while so they continue to have an income. Responsibility lies with organizational leadership and those with established careers who affiliate with these organizations, which at times in the past has included me. And responsibility means acknowledging the enterprise of counterterrorism and counterextremism as inextricably violent, inextricably colonial, and ultimately irredeemable.