Key Reflections
* The phenomenon of ‘code-switching,’ in which individuals switch from one extremist ideology to another one, has some core components including antisemitism, toxic masculinity, and intolerance towards a democratic, pluralistic society.
* In a short span of time, sovereign citizen conspiracy theories have managed to spread globally and are believed to have fuelled the 2022 plot to overthrow the German government.
* Social media platforms have amplified the threat of conspiracy theory-based terrorism throughout the pandemic. In some cases, teenagers and children have been lured into extremism from online gaming platforms.
* Specialists with an expertise in countering violent extremism are needed if deradicalisation is to work. Those working in mental health are well-placed to understand the factors that fuel radicalisation.
* The Mothers for Life Network was established to connect parents whose children had gone to join the so-called ISIS caliphate in Iraq and Syria. It has provided a support structure for the communities and families.
* ‘Disguised Compliance,’ where people pretend to take part in deradicalisation programmes only to commit an attack after, is a concern. Voluntary deradicalisation may improve the chances of individuals cooperating.
Transcript:
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
DK: Daniel Koehler
SG: Hello, and welcome to DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel. Each episode, we speak to experts and practitioners in international security and defence, counter-terrorism, and geopolitical current events to gain insight into the most pressing matters of global affairs.
In this episode we speak with Daniel Koehler who is the Director of the German Institute on Radicalisation and De-radicalisation Studies (GIRDS) which he established in 2014. Daniel’s research is primary focused, and he has developed several corresponding programmes in dealing with radicalisation. He has also published numerous articles and chapters on the topic. Daniel works with governmental agencies to help coordinate prevention networks against violent extremism. Amongst several affiliations with universities and institutes, Daniel is also on the Editorial Board of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague.
Daniel Koehler, a very warm welcome to NATO DEEP Dive.
DK: Thank you so much for having me, I’m really excited to be here.
SG: Well, it’s our pleasure.
Let’s look at the work that you’ve done, including what you’ve written. Why did you write From Traitor to Zealot and what did you learn from the research?
DK: From Traitor to Zealot is my most recent book that came out at the end of last year with Cambridge University Press. It’s really about the phenomenon of side switching across hostile extremist ideologies. For example, the neo-Nazi becoming a far-left anti-fascist or far-left extremist switching to become a Salafi jihadi, for example. And here in Germany, there are a couple of well-known cases of former terrorists like for example, former left wing terrorist that is currently one of the leading Salafi jihadi preachers in prison, or a former co-founder of the Red Army Faction, a left wing terrorist group, the Red Army Faction, Horst Mahler who is now an open neo-Nazi, an open Holocaust denier.
So, these cases are kind of well known, but it turned out when I spoke to colleagues, [asking] what does actually explain their side switching? Are there any theories? Is there any background research? No one had any idea about it. It seemed to me that there is actually nothing out there and that that was really, really stunning because these are such fascinating biographies. So, I wanted to understand how they explained their side switching to their environment, to the public. And it turns out, many of them actually have written autobiographies or given interviews or given some kind of statements, where they try to explain that they’re not traitors, but they’re actually more convinced or more serious about core values and core attitudes, within their extremist environment.
So, I figured if we can understand side switching across ideologies, we might be able to identify something like a source code for extremist radicalisation, the core narratives, the core moving, ideological components, so to speak. And I found that, for most of them, antisemitism, toxic masculinity, and strong hatred against a democratic, pluralistic society, are driving forces, that in each form of violent extremism they are active.
SG: That’s very interesting. It brings me to the recent plot that happened on 7 December 2022, when 25 members of a suspected far-right extremist group were arrested for allegedly planning a coup d’état in Germany. You spoke about this dynamic, about entities that were opposed to a democratic pluralistic society, can you talk more about this plot and how significant it is?
DK: At the moment it is very difficult to tell because we’re very early in the investigation process and obviously we’ll have to wait for the court trial and for the information to come out to really see how far this group has progressed. But from what has been reported in the press, and what kind of information the Federal Prosecutor General has released, it is a very, very interesting kind of group, that was supposedly mainly driven by a combination of sovereign citizen ideology and beliefs, so beliefs that deny that there’s a legitimate German state currently, on the one hand, and on the other hand, by QAnon the U.S. based conspiracy theory that claims that there’s a global paedophile sex trafficking ring led by Democratic elites and societal elites, where children are abducted and tortured to gain some kind of drug for them.
And if that’s true, this QAnon-sovereign citizen plot would be definitely the most serious and sophisticated—largest—QAnon terrorist plot in the world, which is quite interesting to see how quickly QAnon has spread in Germany, which has basically arrived with the pandemic and early 2020. But there’s no question that this group was actually posing a threat for a successful coup d’état. They could never have actually brought down the government or taken overpower. Even though they had obviously people with military training or police background, even some people who could have opened the doors to the parliament building, but the German democratic system was designed with the experience of the Second World War, and the Nazi rule. So, our political system, the strong federalism, the strong separation of powers, is designed deliberately as an antidote against specifically extreme right coup d’états. So, it would be very, very difficult, if not impossible for a group like that to do any significant damage to the political system, to the state, but obviously, they could have abducted and killed individuals, they could have created a panic, they could have conducted bomb attacks, so I would definitely not want to say that they were not dangerous at all, but then we’re not really dangerous to the federal democratic order or to the political system. So, that’s important to make the differentiation.
SG: Very much so, and as you say, the case is still unfolding so more is to be established about it. You spoke about the pandemic earlier, has the pandemic fuelled radicalisation and made it harder to counter because of the fact that so many dynamics emerged during two and a half years that were perhaps difficult to monitor and track because of the fact that the ability to be physical in contact with people was harder.
DK: It definitely has fuelled radicalisation, it even brought, more or less, a new form of extremism to Germany. When the pandemic started, in early 2020, in March and April, and the lockdown came in full effect later on in Germany, we saw this immediate rise of conspiracy based anti-Vax, anti-COVID, measures movement called the ‘Querdenker’ literally ‘lateral thinkers,’ QAnon, and many, many other conspiracy movements, were basically united through their shared belief that either the pandemic does not exist or the virus is just manufactured to suppress the people, or it’s just not that dangerous, the government is using it as an excuse to spy and oppress the people. And later on, obviously, they came in with all these conspiracy theories about the vaccination, it’s just pure poison to kill white races etc, etc.
So, this whole conspiracy movement grew rapidly in Germany and mixed with sovereign citizen movements, far-right, extreme right movements, so neo-Nazi groups and sovereign citizens were very quick to prey and to kind of benefit from that movement and to intermingle, to bring in their own narratives and ideologies. And very quickly this whole conspiracy-extremist environment, which was actually later on classified as extremist, by the German intelligence because they are so full of hatred against the government, against the democratic society, and so pro-violence, that they grew so quickly and outgrew every other extremist environment in Germany, by far even combined there. They’re just so large in terms of people who consume these narratives that are usually highly antisemitic, pro-violence, against democratic order, against the police, against the government, and that has resulted in a string of violent acts, for example, the murder of Idar-Oberstein, the plot to kidnap public health minister Lauterbach, obviously, the current plot that you mentioned, there was a murder-suicide in Brandenburg where a father killed his three daughters and his wife, and then committed suicide because his wife had a fake vaccination passport that was detected and he thought that his children would now be taken away into this QAnon global paedophile ring, so he killed his whole family.
So, there was a whole string of violent acts and plots that came out of this conspiracy-extremist movement, which is really, really difficult for the German counter-terrorism, counter-extremism environment, to grasp, to understand where these people come from. They typically have no background in extremist radicalisation, extremist environments, that come from everywhere in the society. But the plot that you mentioned, the most recent one, you had a pilot in there, you had a singer in there, you had a doctor in there, you had a judge in there, you had a cook in there. So, very diverse, different backgrounds that are only united through these hardcore, extremist conspiracy theories, and that is quite worrying. We currently see, in that particular form of extremism, the main threat to our domestic security
SG: Building on that, has online radicalisation gone deeper into the dark web and through encrypted messaging as a result of the pandemic and some of the dynamics that we’re talking about?
DK: To be honest, I think that those extremists and terrorists who actually think about operational security and technical countermeasures and hiding their steps and go deeper into hiding, they definitely exist, and they definitely are out there. But with the current threats, the conspiracy based threats, and larger scale, for example, the Telegram environment, et cetera, they have turned to mainstream platforms like Telegram or gaming platforms during the pandemic, where they believed they could openly speak and exchange information without being detected because they thought that Telegram would never, ever cooperate with the German authorities and for a long time, it didn’t. And so, they believed Telegram to be a safe space. So, my impression was that the speed and the sheer size of people getting radicalised through the pandemic, has resulted in them actually using less OpSec and less measurements for staying hidden. So, learning the dark web and learning to navigate the dark web, it requires some kind of technical skills, right? In most of these individuals, they radicalised so quickly that they actually wanted to engage right away with this extremist community. For most part, they directly went to Telegram or on gaming platforms like discord, but mainly telegram and used their names and use their real handles and they believed that that the authorities would never actually find them.
SG: You spoke about online gaming platforms. Can you talk to me about the radicalisation of children that is happening through those online gaming platforms?
DK: Yes, that’s also, I think, a very, very concerning trend that we’ve seen in a number of Western countries, in the UK, for example, in the US, a decrease in the age of suspects in far-right terrorist circles, especially there’s a link with a ‘Terrorgram’ environment on Telegram ‘Atomwaffen Division’, Feuerkrieg Division’, ‘Sonnenkrieg Division’, where we know that some of the leading members and founders of these groups are essentially children, they’re 12, 13, 14 years old. So, we have started a research project, where we looked at police investigations that involve children and extreme right radicalisation on online gaming platforms. And we’ve published on that and looked at a couple of cases of 12-year-olds and 15-year-olds. And what happens on these gaming platforms is actually that they use the gaming, to bond, to connect to other, older individuals, still teenagers, but older, who are openly extreme right. They’re using extreme right codes and symbols in their handles, in their avatars. And then they bond, they basically play for example, a strategic Second World War simulation game, and then they will discuss, ‘what’s the Wehrmacht?’, ‘who’s Adolf Hitler?’, ‘what’s the Holocaust?’ And then they get invited into gaming adjacent platforms like on Discord, certain Discord groups and service where it stops being about the gaming, it starts [being] about the political and ideological indoctrination right away.
So, they get taken off the gaming environment and being put into this ideological, high pressure, indoctrination environment, where the goal of these older neo-Nazis or extreme rightists is to change offline behaviour. So, these kids are basically used to immediately do something offline, to commit crimes, even plot terrorist attacks. And then they get channelled into Telegram groups from these gaming servers on Discord. So, it’s almost like a pipeline that by playing video games, they get to know others who are openly extreme right, and they get invited into groups on Discord. From there, they get channelled into Telegram groups within the ‘Terrorgram’ environment, with the goal to actually radicalise them on the highest pressure. So, as quickly as possible because these older teenagers, obviously they don’t know how long these kids will stick to their online community.
So, very concerning and these kids have, usually from what we’ve seen, they have broken family backgrounds, they’re often times victims of bullying, they have mental health issues, so it makes sense for them to seek out strong hierarchies and alliances and loyalty in these online virtual groups, at least it’s what they are promised there, right? They have to give a pledge of allegiance and fill out questionnaires to give them the status of the lead when they are in these groups. And this is why they actually obey these calls for criminal activities. I’ve seen what these kids actually said: ‘I had to do it because he was the leader of the group, or he was the deputy of the group, and I didn’t want to lose my status in that environment.’
SG: Well, indeed, as you said, this is a very dangerous pipeline. If we pivot to how to deal with this, how to counter it, you’ve worked a lot in deradicalisation. There are often ideas of what deradicalisation entails and there are sometimes misconceptions of it too. What would you say are the most significant misconceptions about deradicalisation?
DK: Oh, there are so many. I think one of the first is that deradicalisation does not require any kind of specialisation and training and expertise, so that you can just, quote unquote send a psychologist or a therapist or a social worker or a police officer to do the job, and there is no social worker training or psychologist education on the world, that would qualify you automatically to handle extremist radicalisation, you need to study that in particular, you need to do specialise on that.
So, as communities of expertise, we need to build a professional field where people can study and specialise in countering violent extremism or deradicalisation, that’s the first. So, whatever your background is, as a psychologist, as a therapist or social worker, specialise, train more, to really focus on countering extremist radicalisation and deradicalisation, it’s very, very complex and hard work.
Second, I would say, is the role of ideology. So, many people think that deradicalisation versus disengagement essentially means, “Do I talk about ideology, or do I not talk about ideology?” And when they mention ideology, they have something very abstract and intellectual in mind, like a worldview, or like a philosophical system, “I need to debate Mein Kampf” or “I need to debate the Quran” or “need to teach them the correct form of Islam,” or whatever. And actually, in reality, it’s much more nuanced.
So, deradicalisation is really about identifying the individual driving factors for a person to radicalise, to understand really what makes them so fascinated, what draws them into the extremist environment. And this can be friendship, this can be social issues, can be a quest for justice and significance. There are so many motives, but they are very individually mixed. So, you need to understand the individual person and his or her drivers. And then identifying alternatives to that and making positive alternative options available to the person so that they don’t need the extremist environment anymore. And it’s not just about solving negative issues like bullying or like mental health issues. Obviously, they are important, but it’s not all about that. It’s really about providing them with a positive vision of something to strive for, something that they equally find fascinating, like really that gets them fascinated and attracted. And for that, I personally use a much more nuanced understanding of ideology, as really like a DNA that has different components, building blocks.
For example, political ideas, like justice and honour and masculinity and violence, and how they are configurated, how they are understood by each person, drives them to certain behaviours. So, during deradicalisation, usually if it’s done correctly and properly, we actually kind of try to carefully restructure the DNA, the ideological DNA of these individuals so that in the end, they might still be driven by a quest for significance, a quest for justice, but now they have a different understanding of what justice means for them and how they can achieve it in a peaceful way, in a more holistic way, for example. So, it’s very detailed, very hand-tailored to each individual’s needs. That’s the key actually.
SG: Detailed, specifically tailored, nuanced—these are key dynamics that you’re raising. It leads me to one of the projects that you’ve worked in, which is the Mothers for Life Network. So, my understanding is that this is a network of mothers whose sons and daughters went to Syria and Iraq, and in many cases, they never returned. Tie this into two questions I have for you: what has this network been doing to deal with this, and can it play a role in the deradicalisation of people that are in those ISIS camps in northern Syria?
DK: When the network was established in late 2014-early 2015, it basically grew out of a specific need that these parents had across different countries. At the time, most countries did not have any family counselling support for the relatives of those radicalised in a Salafi jihadist environment. So, these parents looked for help. They looked for support to understand what had happened and what they could do as parents to help the children, ideally, to come back and deradicalise and reintegrate. In some cases it actually worked, but mainly it was first and foremost a self-help group, to cope with the effects of having a family member, your child radicalising and being killed in Syria and Iraq, or being treated as a terrorist, and in most cases, they were a member of a terrorist organisation, these children, and that is exceptionally destructive and toxic for the remaining families, even for other family members and siblings that were also at risk of radicalisation, for example. So, there has to be a specific support structure in place for the families and communities that are left behind when someone radicalises, so that was the first step—provide the self-help group, actually, that these parents, and mostly mothers, could talk to other mothers who had been through the same experience, so that they knew they’re not alone, that they knew how to handle the stress and the hurt, all the anxiety, the fears.
And the second one was obviously that there are also other parents of children who are in the early stages of radicalisation, who are not that far gone and have not left during Iraq. And then these parents became almost beacons of light that attracted these other parents in their own countries, because they were much more trustworthy and much more approachable than most security agencies, intelligence and police agencies in these countries. So, they were automatically contacted by other parents asking, “What can I do now? How can I spot this, and how can I prevent my son and daughter from going down that pathway?” So, these parents turned into natural counsellors for other parents, and this is why I wanted to create a network where they can help each other to be better at that. And…I provided training to some of these parents, I’ve connected this self-help group to various support structures in different countries, ranging from the U.S. to Norway to Italy, so that when these parents are approached by others asking for help, they could refer them to existing and professional help structures to actually do what they had been missing in their own experience. So, these two things are main components of the Mothers for Life Network also.
Also, we tried of course to raise awareness for the stress and the destruction that radicalisation does to families and parents. Many of these parents, I’ve got to say, were secondary victims; their children radicalised, and in many cases, the society has treated them as the person to blame. They said, you know, “It’s your fault as a parent that your son or daughter has radicalised,” even though in many cases I would say it’s the society as a whole that has to bear the blame. This creates more friction and more conflict in the communities. And Mothers for Life really is about healing and connecting the families back to the communities and back to the authorities and other institutions that they needed.
And your other question regarding the effectiveness of deradicalisation in the camps over there, I’ve got to say, it depends a lot on the local situation. Obviously, a deradicalisation programme cannot really work in a situation that does not provide human rights, that does not provide all the access to the basic services a human being has a right to, for example, education and health and mental health, and all the other services. Obviously, if there are grave human rights abuses, if there’s a grave danger to your health and your safety in these camps, then deradicalisation would not be the first thing I would do with them. In my perspective, providing them with a safe and healthy environment, mostly for these women and children, would be the best strategy for deradicalization currently, before you start talking about ideology and teachings of ISIS etc. But I can only speak from my perspective or view from what I’ve read and heard about the situation in the camps. So wherever there’s diseases, where they are diseases, where there are human rights abuses, where there’s violence raging, and no one actually is taking care of the basic needs of human beings, then radicalisation will always be a major option for these people to escape these situations, to make meaning and sense out of it, that you are in such a horrible situation.
SG: You raise a lot of important points to do with the challenges that exist and also what you have to say, not just about the Mothers for Life Network, which is an important grassroots organic movement, but also the specifics about the camps themselves and what needs to be prioritised there. We’ve seen people game the system and pretend to reform, pretend to be taking part in deradicalisation programmes. We’ve seen it in Austria, in the U.K., but then they end up carrying out attacks. What is, in your opinion, being missed in seeing the fault in that programme that perhaps, on reflection with the benefit of hindsight, could have perhaps identified those gaps?
DK: It’s actually quite brilliant and timely that you asked this question because I just recently finished a research project together with the University of Queensland looking at disguised compliance in deradicalisation programmes. And we interviewed a number of deradicalisation programme personnel across the world and asked them about their experience and their perspectives on it. And I would say in those countries where you have mandatory participation in these programmes—forced participation—in most cases in the United Kingdom, for example, or North African and many Asian and other countries, where there’s basically no question, you’re forced to participate, and then you have a much higher rate of disguised compliance, of trying to game the system.
While in countries like Germany, where, for the most part, deradicalisation is completely voluntary, you automatically end up with those individuals who have some kind of interest in cooperating with you and then taking part in these programmes. In Germany, for example, most programmes here cannot offer any hard benefits for example, early release from prison or anything like that. If you participate in a programme, it doesn’t make any sense actually to waste your resources and try to game the deradicalisation programmes. It’s actually much more about building a trust-based relationship and learning how to cope with all the different aspects of your past and your biography. So, they do get some benefits psychologically…they learn a lot about themselves, and eventually this might be taken into account by a judge, and they might see it as proof that these individuals are actually reintegrating and rehabilitating. But as a deradicalisation programme in Germany, they can never assure you and guarantee you that you’ll get out of jail earlier just because you participated in the programme. So, this makes a very, very important difference.
So, we have to understand, when you talk about deradicalisation as the system, there is not the one deradicalisation programme. There are many, many different types of programmes across the world, dozens of different types, actually. So it’s more about understanding what specific type of programme and what kind of setting, pre- or post-prison or in prison, active or passive, mandatory or voluntary, what kind of staff, what kind of goals, all these factors play a very important role in understanding the performance of a programme and the expected rate of recidivism or, let’s say, faked, disguise compliance. But generally speaking, from what we know…these programmes tend to have a much, much lower rate of recidivism than any comparable ordinary reintegration and rehabilitation programme. But it might also be a problem that when it comes to terrorism and violent extremism, societies have a very, very low threshold tolerance for failure. So, even if a programme has worked 20 years without a single case of recidivism, and then there’s this one case of fake compliance who conducts an attack, and then everyone would basically think the whole programme is a waste and is a failure and is being played by these individuals. So, it’s really about the context and to see some kind of nuance here, where and how and how long these programmes have operated.
SG: Speaking about context, very often when we talk about deradicalisation, it’s connected to countering violent extremism, which is a very open term in many ways because of so many different dynamics that are involved. It’s often associated with civil society, with civilian institutions. Increasingly, there is this discussion about, is there a place for CVE, countering violent extremism, in the military, in terms of operations abroad, where there is engagement with other societies? Do you think there is a viability for CVE for the military?
DK: Oh, absolutely. I think the German experience has shown for over 20 years now that there’s a strong role and strong tradition even for governmental PVE and CVE, mostly in intelligence and police communities, but also within the military, first and foremost, obviously looking at the threat of extremist radicalisation of soldiers, of military personnel. And obviously, this is a whole different story to talk about. But law enforcement and military communities are very particular. They have very specific psychologies, very specific collective identities. And obviously, they need to take care of protecting themselves against hostile influences from the outside and from the inside. And I think that most Western countries have overlooked the threat that actually is posed by extremist radicalisation in the ranks in their own midst that can lead to grave operational insecurities and even terrorist threats. So yes, first of all, PVE/CVE has to be adapted to the specific needs of a certain environment of, for example, the military culture, the policing culture, or even the intelligence community.
But beyond that, the military engages other cultures when they are deployed. And in many cases, certain acts of military personnel or military forces in deployment are cited by persons who later became Salafi jihadist terrorists for example or went down other radicalisation pathways. So, I think really, it’s really understanding CVE as a part of civil-military relations and the way a military acts and behaves when they are confronted by and with a different culture, a different context, obviously. So, it does play a role. And obviously in many cases, what the military, at least the U.S. military or the NATO countries, have termed after the Afghanistan war “counterinsurgency,” for example, they’ve tried to find a way to not make insurgencies grow by their own actions. For example, be much more careful how to engage with certain cultures and not to use unnecessary force for example or be culturally aware and appropriate in your actions to not drive people into the arms of insurgents, and that can be framed as countering violent extremism.
SG: Well, you’ve addressed a very important dynamic. In fact, this whole discussion that we’ve had, you’ve helped to demystify a lot when it comes to countering violent extremism as well as the issue of deradicalisation and raise some of the growing and challenging concerns that we will have to face well into 2023 and beyond. Let me thank you again, Daniel Koehler, for joining us on NATO DEEP Dive. We hope to have you back again sometime.
DK: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you.
SG: Thank you for listening to this episode of DEEP Dive. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel. DEEP Dive is brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme. The production and research team are Marcus Andreopoulos and Victoria Jones. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
Disclaimer: Please note that the views, information, or opinions expressed in the DEEP Dive series are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of NATO or DEEP.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.