Engineers Over-Represented Among Violent Islamic Radicals, Study Shows

In the study Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic radicals? researchers Diego Gambetta from the University of Oxford and Steffen Hertog from Sciences Po in Paris, propose that there are links between a general mindset that is more prevalent among engineering students, and engineers' relative deprivation in some parts of the Islamic world, which can combine to create Islamic radicalisation.

After researching the background of 404 individual members of violent Islamic groups active in the Muslim world the researchers were then able to find the subject of study for 178 members and of these, 78 members (44 per cent) had studied for an engineering degree. In this sample there were individuals from 30 nationalities; the average share of engineers among the total male working population from these same countries is about 3.5 per cent.

The second most popular subject studied was Islamic Studies (34 members), followed by medicine (14 members), sciences (7 members), education (5 members), with 46 members taking other or unknown degrees making up the remainder.

The over-representation of engineers survives even when comparing data from Jihadists based in Western countries to those in Muslim countries, although the proportion of graduates recruited to Western-based radical Islam groups is lower.

Statistical analysis of poll data on US faculty shows that the odds of being both religious and conservative are seven times greater for engineers relative to the odds of a social scientist. Engineering as a degree might also be more attractive to individuals seeking cognitive "closure" and clear cut answers - a disposition that has been empirically linked to conservative political attitudes.

Individuals with above-average skills are also particularly exposed to the frustration and 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 East countries have witnessed since the 1970s, and the crash of oil prices in 1982.

The researchers believe these socio-economic factors, combined with the general mindset of engineers, help to explain why there is such a high proportion of engineers in the sample.

Diego Gambetta says: "The number of militant engineers relative to the total population of engineers is miniscule - yet engineers, relative to other graduates, are over-represented among violent Islamic radicals. Without the severe lack of professional opportunities that engineers had to endure in the Middle East, particularly after the painful economic crises that set in with the collapse of oil prices after 1982, we would not find an over-representation of graduates among violent Islamic radicals - as indeed we do not find it either in the West, in Singapore or even in Saudi Arabia where we know that graduates fared much better professionally.

However, we believe our study shows that without the mindset of the engineer which inclines them on average to take more extreme conservative and religious positions, the engineers in our sample would have largely limited themselves to non-violent forms of radicalisation."

Steffen Hertog agrees, saying: "In the case of the Middle East, deprivation and mindset seem to have worked together, selecting elite graduates first and then engineers among them, which could explain the much larger scale of the phenomenon, while in the West and in Singapore mindset alone seems to explain the phenomenon."

Notes for Editors:

To view the article Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic radicals? in full, go to: http://journals.cambridge.org/radicalengineers

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