Carla Power - Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back From Extremism

LIKE MANY AMERICANS, I spent the winter after Donald Trumps 2016 election to the U.S. presidency with my blood humming, sensing that some new poison was coursing through both the country and my own body. Nights Id lie in bed, my hot face cratered into my pillow, my mind turning over the horrors reported that day, of bans and walls and regulation rollbacks. My chest tight and my breathing shallow, my muscles braced for somethingI wasnt sure what. Staring at the ceiling, then checking the clocks slog toward morning, Id feel waves of adrenaline buffet my fury outward, to Trump, to his party, to anyone whod voted for him. Sometimes the anger curdled into hatred.

By day, Id begun thinking about writing this book. Even as American politics grew more polarized and American extremist voices grew louder, I read about paths people had taken into and out of violent extremism in Germany, Norway, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. My early research focused on young Westerners whod joined ISIS, and in some of them, I recognized something of my own postelection mental state. If one definition of radicalization is a narrowing of ones worldview, a whittling away of the will or the wherewithal to understand other opinions, I was getting a taste of it firsthand. While the stories I was gathering were of foreign wars and jihadist militants, they bore similarities to the febrile atmosphere in the United States. Describing the project to an acquaintance one afternoon, I was met with disbelief. Surely that was a bit much? he responded. Americans werent ready to read a book comparing themselves to members of ISIS.

But as happens so often, an idea once deemed radical is now mainstream. In February 2021, the Ohio Capital Journal (stated purpose: connecting Ohioans to their state government) was asking deradicalization experts how Trump-era extremists compared to ISIS recruits. After the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Elizabeth Neumann, who led counterterrorism efforts as an assistant secretary of homeland security for three years under Trump, told Time that the presidents role for the insurrectionists was akin to that of Osama bin Ladens spiritual leadership of the 9/11 hijackers. She urged the United States to pursue the insurgents with the same intensity that we did Al Qaeda.

After 9/11 , government and media all but equated violent extremism with Islamist jihadist groups. The story was told, over and over, of how terrorism in the United States had dropped out of a clear blue September sky. It would take another day of national trauma, nearly twenty years on, for many Americans to see what statistics showed, and what people of color had long known from experience: the most serious terrorist threat is not foreign, dark, and Muslim but white and American-made. Like the babysitter in the horror movie who realizes the serial killer isnt in the woods but inside the house, the country has finally begun to recognize the proximity of violent extremists. Our most serious threats are internal, not external, observed former defense secretary Chuck Hagel. Politically inspired armed insurgents, extremists, fascist groups and other active destructive forces are now part of the American landscape, as we saw in last weeks attack and occupation of Americas symbolic cradle of our democracy, the Capitol Building.

AS THE COUNTRY GRAPPLES with how to respond to the problem of domestic political violence, questions abound. How do we balance national security with individual freedoms? Are there ways to teach people to embrace a muscular pluralism or even just tolerance? What should be the role of the government in creating deradicalization programs? Whats the line between legitimate political dissent and a threat to society?

Home, Land, Security investigates how people in other countriesand briefly, a handful of American deradicalization pioneershave grappled with such questions. I talked to policemen and politicians, neurologists and social workers, the mothers of ISIS militants, about what propels people toward violent extremism. I went to Indonesia and Pakistan to see how communities rehabilitated terrorists who werent foreigners but neighbors and relatives. In Denmark and Belgium, I met police officers who crafted an innovative program for former extremists, dismissed by its critics as Hug a Terrorist. In Belgium, I interviewed a mayor who was finding ways to stop citizens from becoming radicalized. In Germany, a nation whose reckoning with its Nazi past has put it at the vanguard of rehabilitation efforts, I learned about both the possibilities and the limits of its 720 deradicalization programs.

Along the way, I met people whod pursued vile plans, whether plotting to blow up the Long Island Rail Road or to knife protesters in a peaceful procession. I emerged having learned new ways to think about terrorism and extremism, but also with a curious yet marked feeling of optimism. Around the world, people are experimenting with humane and innovative alternatives to the traditional remedies of prisons and armed response. Many of the solutions I describe here may seem radical, but as the cultural critic Raymond Williams once observed, To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

But I get ahead of myself.

A WEEK SPENT IN Texas a few days after Donald Trumps inauguration began the journey that would eventually become this book. A Dallas group interested in international affairs had invited me to speak about the subject of my first book,