By Farah Pandith
Reviewed by Jeff Patterson, PhD, University of Texas at Austin
Farah Pandith’s new book How We Win: How Cutting-Edge Entrepreneurs, Political Visionaries, Enlightened Business Leaders, and Social Media Mavens Can Defeat the Extremist Threat, provides a broad and personalized overview of efforts to confront violent extremist threats by neutralizing terrorist propaganda and promoting Muslim youth narrative depriving radicals of recruits.
Pandith relies heavily on personal bureaucratic experiences to structure the book. As the first female Special Representative to Muslim Communities in the U.S. State Department, Pandith has served in both Republican and Democratic Administrations for the National Security Council, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council’s Task Force on Countering Violent Extremism.
Much of the book is drawn from anecdotal stories and isolated conversations collected from her extensive travels and conversations with religious leaders, community organizers, government officials, and—most importantly—the youths who are susceptible to the allure of extremist ideology. While acknowledging the influence of ongoing political/economic disfunction and unemployment as driving despondent youth into extremism, she explores the concurrent rhetorical frameworks of violent extremism to speculate on what underlies its allure to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize certain subsets of Muslim youth around the world.
Ultimately, Pandith contends that Muslim millennials are ideologically adrift and drowning in a social environment that provides few normative constructs of Muslim identity. Instead, the current and the emerging generations of post-9/11 Muslim youth have struggled with a disordered and conflicted social construct regarding the nature of Islam itself, and the images portrayed in Western media. This chaotic tangle of conflicting ideological and social identities only perpetuates the insecurities, stresses and weakening of institutions that undermine efforts to a normative identity.
In particular, Pandith points to a particular type of pop culture branding, consisting of “halalization” (the process by which individual youth identify with Islamic culture through social and consumer behavior) or “jihotties” (masculine ISIS fighters on social media in search of prospective brides) as creating an ersatz semblance of authenticity that engenders a credulity and facilitates conversion to extremism.
In these circumstances, Pandith argues, certain segments of Muslim youth become susceptible and find meaning in a strictly fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that promotes a narrative ethos of defending purity of their faith against a world that antagonizes and persecutes them.
Her prescription is to revitalize the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) approaches that emerged in the public diplomacy and counterterrorism policy spheres shortly after the attacks of 9/11. While the term tends to incorporate a plethora of definitions and approaches, CVE approaches broadly encapsulate a core of proactive communication and collaborative community engagement to address the root-cause factors of radicalization in particular communities and individuals, and to break the cycle of extremist violence through soft power approaches of dialogue, intervention, and rehabilitation.
While the CVE approach has been an attractive proscription, political and academic critics have become frustrated in recent years that after nearly two decades of work and billions of dollars, CVE’s ‘hearts and minds’ approach has little to show in countering the appeal of extremist ideologies for Muslim youth. In particular, critics have claimed that the Muslim-centric cultural focus has been criticized for actually undermining the goal of community cohesion and attempted engineering of ‘value changes’ within Muslim communities. In the wake of the recent white nationalist terror attacks in New Zealand, the criticism of focusing solely on Muslim-centric extremism is particularly valid.
Given her early contributions to CVE, it is perhaps unsurprising that Pandith’s recommendations recycle the recommendations and curricula that have been proffered and/or implemented over the past several years: raising awareness, building expertise, and pursuing partnerships with thought leaders in business, technology, and public engagement to improve the foreign policy community in the United States to reach stakeholders, address violent extremist narratives, and encourage alternatives to violence.
What is unique about the book is the renewed call to reinvigorate the CVE approaches in anticipation of a growing generation of nearly one billion Muslim millennials and to more energetically draw broad social and financial forces into collaboration that spans several different touch points of soft power influence. In fact, Pandith ostensibly asserts that shortcomings in CVE efforts were due to a lack of either recognition or commitment on behalf of U.S. bureaucracies. CVE policies were just beginning to take root at the end of the Bush Administration, she claims, and were never truly taken advantage of in the Obama Administration. While such subjective assertions may be debatable, the larger question is why is there not more self-reflection—even speculation—as to what undermined the effort? CVE has flourished in other regions and countries over the last decade—with both positive and negative results—so clearly there are lessons and examples to be drawn from those experiences as well.
And therein lies the strongest critique: For a book that aspires to guide practitioners, I would have hoped for a more detailed discussion of the existing resources, methods, and procedures for deradicalization initiatives, as well as recommendations for what would best constitute the process and outcomes of CVE programs.
For all the broad and extensive experience Pandith brings to the subject, she neglects to provide a sufficiently clear discussion of evidence-based approaches to CVE, and a clear definition of what success in countering radicalization would look like. Pandith does provide some very broad, generalized ideas for measuring and evaluating CVE projects to develop the data to help private sector and governmental agencies to prioritize specific efforts, but her suggestions are almost transitory and do not take advantage of nearly two decades of studies and evaluations of CVE effectiveness.
This is not a trivial issue. Available information about evaluation measures needs to grow in both quantity and quality. Increasingly, academic experts and policy makers are being called upon to demonstrate what we have learned from the various CVE approaches. It would have benefited How We Win to provide some fundamental metrics for future CVE projects to demonstrate positive results, or at the very least pose some basic guidelines to avoid the risk of exacerbating existing tensions with the Muslim youth that extremists find so valuable to target.
How We Win earns a solid three out of four trench coats.
Jeff Patterson, PhD, is a lecturer in strategic communications and political strategy at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founder of GlobalPublicSphere.org, an online forum that encourage dynamic interdisciplinary research and dialogue on the emerging concepts and trends in global communication, public diplomacy, and civic engagement.
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