Amid all the discussion of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his activities prior to boarding flight 253 for Detroit, the fact that he spent three years in London studying mechanical engineering has attracted relatively little attention.
A degree in engineering has no obvious connection with terrorism or religious/political extremism – and yet some research published earlier this year suggests it may be highly relevant.
Looking at the educational background of known militants, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog found that "engineers are three to four times as likely as other graduates to be present among the members of violent Islamic groups in the Muslim world since the 1970s". In fact, the engineers in their sample outnumbered graduates of Islamic studies by more than two to one.
Gambetta and Hertog then set about trying to explain these findings. After rejecting several hypotheses, they settled on two factors as "the most plausible explanation". One was the "relative deprivation" of engineers in Muslim countries and the other was what they called the "engineering mindset".
"Relative deprivation" happens when high expectations or ambitions run into high levels of frustration. In Muslim societies engineering is an elite profession and the entry requirements set by universities are correspondingly high. Engineering has also been promoted by governments in the Middle East and elsewhere as part of their rhetoric of modernisation and technocratic development.
The rhetoric, however, has not been matched by reality – and the researchers suggest it could be a radicalising factor:
Individuals with above-average skills selected on merit are, one would expect, particularly exposed to the frustration and the sense of injustice that comes from finding their professional future hampered by lack of opportunities. This happened on a large scale as a result of the economic and technological development failures that Middle Eastern countries have witnessed since the 1970s.
How much of this applies to Abdulmutallab as a Nigerian is unclear but, considering his privileged family background, it seems quite likely that he felt he was not getting the recognition he was entitled to.
More interesting, and perhaps more likely to apply to Abdulmutallab, is the "engineering mindset". The idea here is that engineering as a subject – unlike, say, history or literature – appeals to students who like to deal in certainties and adopt a rather mechanical view of the world. "A lot of piecemeal evidence," Gambetta and Hertog write, "suggests that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers".
Is this preponderance of engineers something that applies only to violent Islamists, Gambetta and Hertog wondered, or can a similar pattern be found among other kinds of extremists?
Among 19th and 20th century anarchists in a variety of countries they found plenty of lawyers, philosophers and doctors but relatively few engineers. Analysis of leftwing revolutionaries since the second world war showed "engineers were never a significant presence" except in Turkey and Iran (the only two Muslim countries surveyed). Palestinian militants (of a non-Islamist variety) included some engineers but not a disproportionately high number.
Intriguingly, though, the engineering-extremism connection found among violent Islamists does seem to be replicated to some extent, though less strikingly, among extreme rightwing and neo-Nazi groups in Germany, Austria and the US.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ngineering
