Measuring Political Radicalization: Diaspora Support for Terrorism among Ottawa’s Lebanese Muslim Community

Investigators:

Clark McCauley
Christian Leuprecht
Bidisha Biswas

This is project will develop survey measures of beliefs, feelings, and intentions that sympathize with or support anti-government activism and radicalism. These measures – with an emphasis on financial contributions -- will be tested in the context of assessing support for Hizballah among Canadian residents of Lebanese Muslim descent in Ottawa, Canada. The products of the research will be two successive scientific attitude surveys and a web-based panel of Ottawa Muslims available for fast-turnaround assessment of the impact of political events. These tools will be designed to emphasize practical implications for understanding Lebanese Muslim diaspora support for Hizballah. The long-term goal is to develop tools that can track change over time in mass support for anti-government radicalism and support to terrorist organizations—tools with potential for use with diaspora and domestic groups in any country.

The research will contribute to an empirical understanding of political radicalization of diasporas. Scholars have an abundance of hypotheses. Guilt leaving compatriots behind, alienation in their host setting, frustrated socio-economic aspirations, and theological or nationalist ideologies may each contribute to radicalization. Empirical data are necessary to help estimate the relative contributions of these and other factors, and reliable empirical data requires the development of appropriate measures of the characteristics that can predict the degree to which Muslims sympathize with the goals and methods of terrorist organizations in the homeland. This project will examine these phenomenon for the Lebanese diaspora in Ottawa.

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