Of Note: To Whom It Speaks: Cities, Poverty, and Terrorism

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001 there were wide-ranging calls for economic aid to the world’s poor as a way of tamping down terrorism. Former Vice President Al Gore, President George W. Bush, a host of policymakers, and several highly respected academics voiced their intuition that poverty is causally correlated to terrorism.¹

In the years since 2001, however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Sensing a lack of evidence to support these claims— and noting that the 9/11 hijackers were for the most part highly educated Saudis²—several scholars have concluded that there is, in fact, no causal link between poverty and terrorism. One prominent legal expert went so far as to declare that any attempt to connect poverty and terrorism must be politically motivated—the result of a so-called “liberal” distaste for the use of force against terrorists.³

In the more nuanced realms of academia, a number of studies—a 2004 paper by Alberto Abadie and a 2003 paper by Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Malečková being among the best—have shown that an empirical link between poverty, education, and terrorism is quite diaphanous, indirect, and perhaps misleading.⁴ Without questioning the scholarship or merit of these studies, it must be recognized that poverty—urban poverty in particular—is an incredibly important contextual backdrop for the gestation of extremist groups, and terrorism.

Terrorism, as defined in U.S. law, is “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.”⁵ Yet there is almost always more than one audience. Terrorism is a tactic of spectacle, thrust to deliver both violence and voice. On the one hand, the intended audience of terrorism is the group from which the victims of terrorism are culled. On the other hand, there is an intended audience among communities that offer support, potential support, and recruits for terrorist activities.

In his 2004 study, Abadie observed that while a significant association cannot be found between terrorism and measures of wealth, there are certain geographic patterns consistent across countries with high levels of terrorist activity. He writes that “large countries tend to generate centrifugal pressures, include disaffected minorities, and accumulate grievances.”⁶ It is these exact same “centrifugal pressures” that play out in microcosm throughout the world’s slums—the poor are pushed to the outskirts of society, literally and figuratively, and indeed they become communities of the disaffected. They are neglected and mishandled by their governments, and when left fallow, their grievances are easily taken up by organizations equipped to direct discontent.

Al Qaeda, while not providing any sort of social welfare services, espouses an anti-globalization, anti-material, anti-modern ideology that plays well in pockets of urban misery. After all, the images of those who spent the days after September 11 celebrating in the streets were not of upper- or middle-class citizens, enfranchised and satisfied with their lot. And though it has been well documented that the leadership and management echelons of terrorist groups do not come from impoverished backgrounds, it cannot be said that the poor play no role in their agenda—surely, leaders and planners are not often to be found within the ranks of suicide bombers.

Other extremist groups have developed into multi-faceted, community- based support systems, and have been able to provide the nexus point between social welfare and jihad. As Allison Garland and Lauren Herzer point out in the preceding pages, burgeoning city slums are beset by infrastructure problems and a lack of basic services. Organizations such as Hamas gain credibility and political capital by providing education and healthcare to poor urban populations, and they use this community base to push a jihadist agenda.

Surely, as some notable academics have pointed out, not every voice calling for economic aid as a method of combating extremism has come from persons readily able to back up their reasoning with hard and fast evidence, empirical or otherwise.⁷ And no doubt, some of the work that puts forward such arguments has...