Kumar Ramakrishna

Forging an indirect strategy in southeast Asia

The center of gravity of terrorism has shifted to Asia. Instead of using a predominantly military approach in this theater, emphasizing political, economic, and ideological measures are necessary. Three global and four regional policy measures are critical.

Interstate and Intrastate Dynamics in Southeast Asia's War on Terror

Recent studies highlight the relative dearth of counterterrorism cooperation between member nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Acknowledging that more can and should be done by Southeast Asian governments in interdicting terrorism, the authors nevertheless argue that hitherto collaboration between and among security and intelligence services of ASEAN and partner countries in the war on terror has been fairly effective, as evidenced by the capture of key Jemaah Islamiyah militants. On the other hand, weak state capacity and legitimacy as well as bureaucratic competition and rivalry continue to debilitate rather than facilitate national and regional counterterrorism efforts. Moreover, the apparent circumspection of regional responses to terrorism is partly a reaction to the highly militarized counterterrorism strategy embraced by the United States. Finally, the authors contend that radical Islamist terrorism can only be successfully countered by the adoption of a comprehensive approach that addresses a host of real or perceived social, economic, political and ultimately, ideological challenges.

‘Bribing the Reds to Give Up’: Rewards Policy in the Malayan Emergency:

This article examines the rationale for and evolution of the Malayan government’s rewards for information policy during the Emergency. The policy was formulated as a means of exploiting the rural Chinese peasant/terrorist’s fundamentally materialistic outlook. The policy went through some adjustments over time, and proved its true worth when three factors became dominant by the end of 1957: the Malayan Communist Party’s military and political eclipse, a sufficient degree of terrorist faith in government promises of fair treatment on surrender, and very liberal surrender terms. Although very controversial, the rewards policy was moral to the extent that it helped end the Emergency.

The Four Mutations of Violent Muslim Extremism in Southeast Asia: Some Implications for a Cognitive Immunization Policy

M ore than eight years after the horrific terror attacks in Bali in October 2002 that killed 202 civilians, it is apparent that Southeast Asia faces a violent Muslim extremist challenge that is both resilient and ever-changing. The Bali atrocity was perpetrated by Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a hierarchically organized, pan–Southeast Asian terrorist network influenced by al Qaeda. Since then, and particularly in the past year or so, the threat appears to have metastasized beyond JI.1 The result has been what may be termed the “four mutations.” First, owing to much improved police action by Indonesia and other Southeast Asian governments, the old organized JI structure has been decimated, giving rise to a looser network of shifting coalitions. In February 2010, for instance, Indonesian police uncovered a new group, “al Qaeda on the Veranda of Mecca,” more commonly referred to as “al Qaeda in Aceh.”2 This sizable, if motley, group was started by JI veteran Dulmatin (subsequently killed in a police shootout in March 2010) and comprised not just JI militants but also other violent Islamists from groups that were related to the same historic Darul Islam separatist milieu that had spawned JI.3 These individuals—one hundred of whom were arrested in subsequent investigations—had been driven to coalesce in the face of intensified police action following the July 2009 bombings of the Ritz-Carlton and Marriott hotels in Jakarta. Those attacks had been mounted by another violent JI faction led by the Malaysian militant Noordin Top, who was himself subsequently killed in September 2009. The al Qaeda in Aceh group allegedly received moral and financial support from the suspected longtime spiritual leader of JI, Abu Bakar Bashir, who was detained in August 2010 and is, at the time of writing, facing trial for his activities in support of

The Radicalization of Abu Hamdie: Wider Lessons for the Ongoing Struggle Against Violent Extremism in Post-Marawi Mindanao

This essay examines the radicalization into violent extremism of a former Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) militant named Abu Hamdie. It first explores the violent Islamist ASG milieu within which he found himself embedded. Second, it examines how his experiences within a strategic node of the violent Islamist ecosystem in Marawi, the Darul Imam Shafii religious boarding school, facilitated his own radicalization. The essay finally suggests three broad lessons that may be learned from the specific Abu Hamdie radicalization experience for the ongoing struggle against violent extremism in post-Marawi Mindanao: first, the ideological ecosystem of Islamist extremism of which Darul Imam Shafii was an important node must be dismantled; second, the role of long-standing Bangsamoro socio-political and historical grievances must be urgently addressed by the Philippine authorities and third, the increasingly pervasive influence of puritanical Wahhabi ideas, that have rendered impressionable young people susceptible to violent extremist ideological narratives, needs countering.

The Origins of the “Manichean Mindset”

This chapter surveys the debate between so-called Nativists and Behaviorists on whether a universal Human Nature exists, before segueing into the main tenets of the important emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology, which emphasizes how the ancestral environment continues to exert an enduring influence over many modern human impulses, including the instinct for violence. The chapter analyzes ongoing debates between Individual Selectionists who emphasize that individual human competition is the basis for all social life, as opposed to Group Selectionists who argue that humans are at the same time instinctly groupish as well. As Group Selectionists would contend, the innate human predilection for social categorization, together with structurally induced looping effects reifying social group constructs, creates the necessary environmental prerequisites for the Darwinian natural selection of not so much selfish individuals but rather cohesive groups best suited for success in intergroup conflict. The chapter posits that the roots of this social categorization process lie in the first element of the Human Nature Triad, binarity – or the human tendency to employ binary oppositions in making sense of environmental stimuli. Binarity, together with the importance of a wider, psychologically comforting Group Tent in profoundly meeting individual esteem needs and the resulting potential for sometimes self-sacrificial violence against out-groups, implies the existence of an innate Manichean Mindset. This Mindset is expressed in the basic ethnocentric, xenophobic, and dominance-seeking behavior of the in-group vis-a-vis putative out-groups. Hence, intrinsic, potentially combustible, Manichean-minded in-group/out-group cleavages preexist – well before the intervention of a violent extremist ideology.

Is Ideology the “Root” of Islamist Terrorism in Indonesia?

This chapter sets the scene for the study by arguing that current analyses of religiously motivated terrorism in general – and Islamist terrorism in Indonesia in particular – that identify ideology as the “root” of terrorism are incorrect. It identifies two broad questions about religiously motivated terrorism that the book seeks to address through an Indonesian case study: first, do Indonesian Islamists radicalize into violent extremism because of ideology – or do they do so because of some deeper cause? Second, why is it that after all these years violent Islamist terrorism in Indonesia continues to regenerate in the face of intense security force pressure? Moreover, why, despite the apparent absence of a central coordinating body, do these separate cells appear to display an intrinsic interconnectivity with one another? Again, is ideology the root – or is a deeper explanation in order? The chapter contends that the root of religiously motivated terrorism in general and Islamist terrorism in Indonesia in particular in fact runs much deeper, in our shared biological natures. The chapter to this end sets out the notion of the Human Nature Triad – binarity, religiosity, and complexity. Based on this, it theorizes that the combination of a highly tuned dualistic, Manichean Mindset and an embattled religiosity results in religious fundamentalism. When the latter interacts with six intervening factors of a “tight” counterculture, an enabling ideology, a “protean” charismatic group, intragroup psychic dynamics, in-group (social) humiliation, and an enabling environment of poor governance, religiously motivated terrorism may well result.

The “Glocalized” Origins of the Darul Islam Counterculture

This chapter sets the context for the Indonesian case study by analyzing the origins and nature of Islam as it first emerged within the particular socioecological and political environment of seventh-century Arabia. It traces Islam’s arrival and spread throughout Southeast Asia particularly from the late thirteenth century onward, in the process becoming glocalized and developing two broad regional strains of Islams, so to speak. The first strain, deeply influenced by South Asian Sufism, was a largely tolerant traditionalist Islam, characterized – in Hofstedian terms – by collectivism, large power distance, and weak uncertainty avoidance. The second strain emerged from Middle Eastern modernist currents that displayed three conceptually distinct yet frequently commingled tendencies or orientations: a puritanical Wahhabism, a mimetically driven Salafism, and a politically activist Islamism. These modernist tendencies, while themselves indigenized to some degree within the Indonesian islands, nevertheless on balance retained – as in the Middle East – the traits of collectivism, large power distance, and relatively strong uncertainty avoidance. Southeast Asian – and Javanese – Islam is consequently not at all monolithic but diverse and richly textured. It is from such a complex glocalized Indonesian Islamic milieu that the tight Darul Islam Counterculture eventually emerged. This comprised certain iconic historical figures and institutions that formed the cognitively radical social mix which in turn berthed the Darul Islam Charismatic Group – the complex, self-organizing, and adaptive superorganism that ultimately spun off the violent, cognitively extremist cells that have captured today’s headlines.

Muting Manichean Mindsets in Indonesia: A Counter-Ideological Response

This chapter reiterates the study’s central argument – deriving from the Human Nature Triad of binarity, religiosity, and complexity – that a highly tuned Manichean Mindset and an embattled religiosity reside at the core of religious fundamentalism. It reminds the reader that when religious fundamentalism interacts with the six intervening factors of a tight counterculture, an enabling ideology, a protean charismatic group, intragroup psychic dynamics, social humiliation, and an enabling environment of poor governance, fundamentalist violence against out-groups often results. The chapter further argues that the intervening factor of ideology – rather than being the root of terrorism in Indonesia – is instead an enabler. More precisely, ideology is the center of gravity or focal point of the complex, self-organizing, and adaptive DICG system or superorganism. This suggests that targeted policy manipulation of the ideological factor offers the opportunity to generate cascade effects within the DICG system in order to effect transformative change in desired directions. To this end, the chapter sketches out a Counter-Ideological Response (CIR) Model. It suggests that by steadily eroding the potency of the DICG ideological frame through ideology-relevant policy interventions in the Five Spaces of Sender, Message, Mechanism, Recipient and Context, the application of the CIR Model could gradually ameliorate the threat of Islamist violence in Indonesia. It could do so by encouraging evolutionary change within the complex, self-organizing, and adaptive DICG superorganism, away from Manichean-minded fundamentalist religious forms with their latent violent potentials, toward more genuine, self-transcendent, and accommodating forms of spirituality and religiosity.

Six Steps Toward Violent Fundamentalism

This chapter first reviews the current debate on so-called violent radicalization and extremism. It argues that it is theoretically richer and analytically more useful to situate the discussion of violent religious “extremism” or “radicalism” within the wider rubric of a religious fundamentalism energized by an embattled, constricted religiosity and animated by a highly tuned Manichean Mindset. The chapter suggests that a more nuanced understanding of cognitive radicalization and the related terms “cognitive radicalism” and “cognitive extremism” is warranted in order to better shed light on the key psychological mechanisms that help precipitate actual out-group violence. The chapter subsequently unpacks six mutually reinforcing intervening factors that need to be taken into account to explain how religious fundamentalism ultimately tips over into out-group violence: social humiliation, a tight counterculture, a protean charismatic group, intragroup psychic dynamics, an enabling environment of weak governance, and an enabling ideology. The key analytical construct of the charismatic group is also examined, in the process unpacking the third element of the Human Nature Triad, beyond binarity and religiosity: complexity, as well. It will be seen that the protean charismatic group – essentially what some social network and complexity theorists would call a superorganism – functions much like a complex, self-organizing, adaptive system seeking to preserve equilibrium with the ever-evolving environment. In essence, the chapter sheds explanatory light on the intervening processes that help ensure that the nascent violent potentials within religious fundamentalism are ultimately realized.