Scapegoating Does Not Address the Causes of Terrorism

When terrorism is uppermost in the public consciousness, the immediate concern of governments is understandably to focus on the perpetrators, their backgrounds and motivations and the possibility that terrorists surviving attacks will be planning more.

Paris having been on the frontline of intelligence that put paid to a second series of terror attacks following the atrocities of November 13 2014, it is now Brussels's turn to be at the forefront of hunting down the Belgian-Moroccan survivor of the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam.

The basis for Brussels's current city-wide lockdown also derives from intelligence that Abdeslam and possible accomplices are planning a further imminent attack.

Much is said on the causes of terror in the aftermath of attacks, but then very little is actually done. The marginalization of second and third generation migrants in Europe is a common theme in interviews with family and immediate community members, but public enthusiasm to address its root causes is usually short-lived.

Close relatives of suicide attackers often cite the phenomenon of rootless identities, whereby young Belgian Moroccans, for example, are neither Belgian enough for the country of their birth and education, nor Moroccan enough for their parents' or grandparents' place of origin.

The radicalization of those who go on to perpetrate terror is often cited as being a relatively recent phenomenon, and in the case of their affiliation to ISIS or other radical-jihadist organisations, only skin-deep as regards the perpetrators' knowledge and understanding of the religious precepts underlying their ideologies.

The Paris attackers of November appear to have been linked as much by a past in drug-dealing, drink and petty crime than a change towards more ostentatiously religious behavior. In the case of the Abdeslam brothers, their supposed piety was barely six months old; until a couple of weeks before the Paris attacks, they ran a bar in the Moelenbeek district of Brussels, which was closed for alleged drug-dealing just prior to the Paris attacks.

Against this background, the appeal of ISIS appears to be much less inspired by the brutalized version of Islam underlying ISIS's imagined Caliphate than the easy availability of funds, Kalashnikovs, hard drugs, operational training and the associated notoriety of being labelled dangerous outlaws which accrues to successful or would-be terrorists.

The insights accumulated by journalists in the aftermath of attacks commonly tell of the surprise of friends and family at the direction taken by otherwise "normal" men and women. In reality, it is their perceived nonentity which should provoke more active concern over the lack of alternatives open to both them and their immediate peer group.

Deficient education systems and job opportunities take time and public funds to be activated and install, but it is also the lack of a vision that things will ever improve for these communities that is the most striking conclusion to be drawn.

From a public policy perspective, it is as if the petty crime of young banlieue Muslims can be tolerated and managed until such a time as they ratchet up their actions to cold-blooded attacks on their fellow citizens. With hindsight, the subtle signs of their changing intent are often there, yet the capacity (or lack of it) of their communities to manage and redirect the attention of a larger potential base of terrorist recruits is consistently underplayed as a critical tool in official strategies to combat and counter the attraction of ISIS.

Driven by media and popular outrage, governments are quick to intensify security spending directed towards the heartland (in this case Syria) of the ideologies and organizations that tip the balance in turning the passive anger of the disaffected youth towards violent extremism.

Thus, budgets for defense, coordinated intelligence and public surveillance increase at the European regional and international levels, while programs such as "Prevent" pre-empt more sustainable policies towards inclusion and inspirational opportunities closer to home.

For a fraction of the price of new weaponry and the recruitment of new intelligence operatives, much more could be done to act on the insights of political sociologists, psychologists, educationalists and the very communities closest to the core of the immediate challenge.

That tackling the exclusion of Europe's ethnic and religious minorities is a two-way street is the first such insight, not least since creating and sustaining social mobility is above all the responsibility of mainstream society and governments.

Another is that sustainable and attractive alternatives have to be consciously created to fill the void currently filled by the stealthy recruitment operatives of ISIS. An individual's turn to violence and/or terrorism is a process, not a choice made out of the blue, when a lifetime of slights and rejections contrasts starkly with the abundance of choice and opportunities facing fully-integrated members of the same European societies.

Left unchecked, the current risk is that the alienation and rejection of whole communities on the basis of their religion will be driven by populist right-wing parties, rather than being countered by more conscious efforts to heal the breach in the counter-terrorist strategies currently being elaborated in European capitals.

In other contexts, much is made of the negative impact on growth in developed economies, above all the US and Europe, of the current rise in inequalities between the accumulated wealth of the richest 1 percent and the diminishing resources of the remaining 99 percent.

The same logic needs to be applied to the social deficits of badly integrated second and third generation migrant communities across Europe. The rationale of defensive action by governments is warranted in the short-term, but is not enough to stave off future risks of terrorism.

The perceived effectiveness of terrorism has, if anything, received a boost for the less than 0.1 percent of Europe's Muslim population who see no other way to get their names into history books. The other 99.9 percent now also needs to be heard and heeded: not as outsiders to the European project, but as one of Europe's strongest bulwarks should their nation's combined resources of social recognition and greater social mobility be accorded to them in earnest this time.

Claire Spencer is senior research fellow for the Middle East and North Africa Programme and Second Century Initiative at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs.