Nils Mallock is a postdoctoral researcher with the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme at King’s College London (KCL). Here, he tells us about his experience researching the psychological causes of violent and high-risk political action, touching on his previous work in Iraq and Lebanon.
I’m Nils Mallock, a postdoctoral researcher for the XCEPT team at KCL. My research focus has mostly been in political violence and extremism, and how this differs from more moderate forms of collective action, such as activism and peaceful political protest. Specifically, I have looked at the psychological causes underlying political behaviour, asking what motivates people to engage in, or disengage from, different forms of political action in different contexts.
Within the XCEPT project, I am working on our large longitudinal survey, called the Impact of Trauma Survey (IoTS), in Lebanon and Iraq. The IoTS is exploring the psychological impact of conflict exposure on things like mental health, trauma, and people’s perceptions of their social environment, and how these factors then in turn shape a person’s political beliefs and behaviours. As well as this, I’m jointly responsible for leading a multifaceted intervention study that we’re planning in Iraq, where we will test psychological interventions that could encourage reconciliation between groups in a post-conflict context.
The Al-Shohada Bridge in Mosul, Iraq, which was destroyed during ISIS’ occupation of the city. Credit: Nils Mallock
After finishing my undergraduate studies in Germany, I moved to Lebanon to work as a researcher for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s Syria/Iraq office, as I was learning Arabic and interested in the dynamic politics of the Middle East. Seeing the effects of conflict first-hand made me want to understand how these conflicts emerge and what drives people to participate in them. I realised that everyone talks about political conflicts at a very structural and abstract level, looking at group dynamics, demographic changes, and social movements, but that this does not really explain why, among people in the same environment, some people embrace political violence, others embrace activism, and the vast majority do not even engage at all. There are clearly individual factors at play, but we don’t understand them robustly, especially in harder-to-access places, such as in conflict-affected regions, where insights are probably most valuable.
A display of art-based cultural and political action in Jenin Refugee Camp, West Bank. Credit: Nils Mallock
This interest led me to my PhD with the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), which examines the psychological motivations for violent versus peaceful political action in what I call ‘high-stakes’ environments. This can mean conflict-affected contexts, but also could be in countries with authoritarian governance. These high-stakes environments make it drastically more risky or costly for individuals to take even peaceful political action. I’m interested in what causes people to overcome these (seemingly) rational barriers and engage, especially for more radical and extreme political actions. This means asking: what psychological motivations are strong enough for people to ignore these costs and risks?
My PhD investigates this through quantitative studies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories, supplemented by interviews with activists and members of armed groups. For example, one study examined the effect of geographical proximity to Israeli settlements in the West Bank on different forms of protest behaviour. This study found that the mere presence of these settlements caused a shift towards participation in higher-risk action and away from lower-risk forms of protest.1
Silwan district in East Jerusalem. The predominantly Palestinian community is the site of intense land disputes, forced evictions and construction of Israeli settlements. Credit: Nils Mallock
I’m currently working on an XCEPT article, joint with my PhD at LSE, in which we report a series of experimental studies that I conducted in collaboration with civil society organisations and universities across seven locations in Iraq. These explored the role of uncertainty on political radicalism and activism. Previous studies have shown that, when someone’s sense of self is threatened, this creates feelings of uncertainty which often leads the person to act defensively. Interestingly, this defensiveness can manifest in expressing stronger opinions and extreme views about things that are completely unrelated.
For instance, if I lose my job, and that is central to my identity, I may try to compensate for that by expressing more extreme political opinions on controversial issues like abortion rights or discrimination against other groups, because this provides a feeling of certainty about my world view and restores a sense of unique identity. However, it wasn’t known at the time whether this mechanism extended also to intentions to actually act on those political beliefs. On top of that, we didn’t know whether this applied in conflict-affected settings, where uncertainty is generally higher.
View onto Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque in Beirut, Lebanon. Credit: Nils Mallock
In our studies, participants were exposed to feelings of uncertainty, through an exercise in which they reflected on their own mortality. Their intentions to take different kinds of political action were then measured. What we found is that the people exposed to feelings of uncertainty were more willing to engage in political action, and especially in radical actions compared to more moderate activism. However, this was not the case when the participants were given another opportunity to restore their self-certainty – by reflecting on and writing a short text about something particularly meaningful to them – before measuring their intentions. Interestingly, we found some evidence that those measuring higher in emotional stability were in general not responding to those mechanisms. These findings could give some initial insights to help design targeted psychological interventions to support social reconstruction efforts in conflict-affected regions.
Street advocacy by Palestinian activists in South Hebron Hills, West Bank. Credit: Nils Mallock
My colleagues and I on the XCEPT project are going to conduct a comprehensive study in Iraq to understand causal mechanisms of intergroup conflict and, as importantly, pathways for reconciliation and peacebuilding between former or current conflict groups. Intervention studies have already been done in other complex settings, such as in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but this kind of research is actually rare in Iraq. This is partly because it’s harder to access as a research population, especially with surveys of this scale.
What we will do is test several psychological interventions promoting reconciliation between groups, working with local partners and civil society organisations. For example, one intervention will aim to counter false perceptions of the outgroup as being ‘fixed’ and inherently incapable of change, which can be an obstacle for successful reconciliation. Then we will compare the different interventions in what’s called a ‘tournament’ study design, where the most successful intervention from this stage will be taken forward with participants from all over Iraq, including many of those taking part in our IoTS.
Banners in South Lebanon displaying members of political parties and militias. Credit: Nils Mallock
This will allow us to look at how different characteristics identified in our IoTS, such as mental health or personality traits, influence responses to the intervention. We will also target these interventions to their specific context within Iraq by working with local experts and advisors to make sure the materials are relevant to the different groups, and this will be interesting because it’s quite novel to do this kind of work.
The intervention study will be highly innovative research pushing into new territory. This is because it is being run in Iraq, which is rare, and because it will directly compare multiple interventions on a large-scale with a highly diverse sample. The overall goal is to identify causal mechanisms of conflict reconciliation and the improvement of intergroup relations. The big benefit of this study is that it involves measuring the intentions of the participant before and after the intervention. This will help practitioners, who are signalling strong demand for insights into what efforts might be effective to build social cohesion in a post-conflict setting.
This Q&A was originally published on the ICSR website.
Doing research in conflict-affected areas carries particular challenges and risks. In this video edition of the podcast, researchers working in borderland regions of Asia, the Middle East and Africa share their experiences and approaches to conducting fieldwork. Key challenges include engaging with diverse actors, maintaining local networks, and establishing trust with respondents. Our experts also share their thoughts on researchers’ positionality in the bigger picture of conflict response and reduction, and how the pandemic has enabled us to think about data collection in new ways.
This episode features:
Joseph Diing Majok, an anthropologist and researcher at the Rift Valley Institute in South Sudan. His work is focused on the borderland regions between Northern Bahr el-Ghazal state in South Sudan, and Darfur and Kordofan in Sudan.
Seng Mai Maran and Hkawng Yang from Kachinland Research Centre in Northeastern Myanmar at the border with China. Their recent fieldwork examines the nexus between post-coup conflicts and illicit activities in Kachin State, focusing on the impacts on borderland communities.
Kheder Khaddour, a non-resident scholar at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. His research centres on civil-military relations and local identities in the Levant, with a focus on Syria.
Tabea Campbell Pauli is a senior programme officer with The Asia Foundation’s XCEPT programme, and can be reached at [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, not those of The Asia Foundation.
They are a group of Lebanese muscular tattooed men dressed in uniform black t-shirts, some of them heavily bearded, and carrying provocative religious iconography and symbols.[i] They are not Muslims, but Christians. They call themselves Jnoud al-Rab (Soldiers of God) and lead their own political, religious, and spiritual uprising, guided by the word of Jesus Christ as they interpret it.[ii] Their coat of arms is shown on their cars, mopeds, and t-shirts: a picture of the wings of Saint Michael the Archangel and a shield decorated with the cross of Jesus Christ, all sitting above the Holy Bible.[iii]
Soldiers of God claims that it carries out the teachings of Jesus Christ and is entrusted with his commandments. It defines itself as neither a party nor an organisation, but a militia group formed with the aim of protecting Christians and offering reassurances to residents worried about rising levels of crime – including armed robberies, carjackings, handbag snatches, and the theft of internet and telephone cables – in the majority Christian neighbourhood of Achrafieh in Beirut.[iv]
Self-security in Beirut is already a concern as Hezbollah conducts security patrols, checks the identities of passing citizens, interferes in the movements of the Lebanese security services, and blocks journalists from moving freely in the areas under its control.[v] The rise of far-right Soldiers of God has raised fears that Achrafieh will join this self-securitisation and paramilitary policing phenomenon, bringing Beirut back to the time of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) when the state collapsed, militants controlled the streets, and the city was ideologically divided into the Christian East and Muslim West. These fears are increasing in light of the ongoing political paralysis and economic depression that has afflicted Lebanon since 2019, which crippled the state apparatus and is fuelling poverty in the worst shock since the civil war.[vi]
Read the full article here, originally published on the ICSR website.
[i] L’orient Today (2022) Who are Achrafieh’s Soldiers of God? [Online] available from https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1304447/who-are-ashrafiehs-soldiers-of-god.html
[ii] Soldiers of God (2023) [Facebook] 25 July 2023. Available at https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=670093338494283&set=a.628163606020590
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Jnoud El Rab (2023) About Us [online] available at https://www.jnoudelrab.com/about-us/;
Reuters (2022) Beirut neighbourhood watch echoes troubled past [online] available at https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/beirut-neighbourhood-watch-echoes-troubled-past-2022-11-27/
[v] AlHurra (2022) The Eyes of Achrafieh… guardian angels or an introduction to self-security and division in Beirut? Translated by El Kari, Mohamad. [Online] available at https://bit.ly/3wysNVf
[vi] Ibid.
Dr Nafees Hamid interviews Dr Hannes Rusch about his work examining the ‘logic’ of intergroup conflict.
Dr Rusch talks us through the basic models which explain why groups might choose conflict, and highlights key questions that remain unanswered by the research.
You can also listen to the King’s College London War Studies podcast on their platform, where this episode was originally published.
In this episode, Dr Costanza Torre and Dr Fiona McEwen discuss XCEPT’s research in South Sudan, which aims to understand how experiences of conflict may lead someone to engage in violent, instead of peaceful, behaviour. They discuss the importance of hiring local researchers, the challenges of carrying out research in South Sudan, and how mental health disorders may be understood differently in South Sudan.
*This episode was recorded in early March 2024, before the recent escalation of violence in Sudan.
‘Resilience’ has become a buzzword in the field of countering violent extremism (CVE), but how useful is it?
In this episode, Federica Calissano interviews Dr Nafees Hamid about the benefits and drawbacks of CVE initiatives which focus on building resilience to violent extremism.
You can also listen on the King’s College London War Studies podcast channel, where this episode was originally published.
Read Federica’s XCEPT blog post: What do we mean when we talk about ‘resilience’ to violent extremism?
In recent years, numerous citizens of the KRI have lost their lives trying to cross the English Channel in small boats. Many people moving from the region to Europe and the UK since 2014 have done so in response to corruption and political conflict in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). Since its creation in 1991 with the support of the US and the UK, the KRI has been under tight control of two main parties: the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Ruling the region through a duopoly, the PUK/KDP have provided little power, resources and economic opportunities to citizens who fall outside their own clientelist and patronage networks.
Party dominance and corruption, combined with years of conflict over resource-sharing with the central government in Baghdad, have compounded the KRI’s financial and economic crisis and generated strong incentives for the region’s citizens to migrate using available smuggling networks. The KRI is riddled with active smuggling networks that make it possible for citizens from the region to invest their entire life savings in the hope of relocating to the UK to begin anew, highlighting the deep-seated desire for change and a better life away from the systemic issues plaguing their homeland.
Chatham House XCEPT research highlights the involvement of both local and international actors in a complex web of human smuggling, which capitalizes on the desperation of individuals seeking better lives. This transnational network exacerbates the plight of its victims, exploiting their circumstances for profit. The recent arrests have once again brought to light the issue of Kurdish migration, which for years has been driven by political corruption and conflict within the KRI, facilitated by transnational networks.
Read the full blog here, originally published on the Chatham House website.
I just came back from the 2024 Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development hosted by SIPRI. It was a stimulating event, replete with doom and data, attended by a throng of practitioners, activists and researchers, many doing remarkable things to put our fractured world to rights.
I was there with Simon Long’oli, Director of the Karamoja Development Forum, a community organisation in northern Uganda, where violence is an everyday reality. Simon and I were there to provoke colleagues on their notions of what constitutes good evidence in situations of violence and conflict.
We were arguing that community action research offers not only deep insight but also reaches the parts other research doesn’t reach. We were being cheeky, because we know that good qualitative and quantitative research has the capacity to be pivotal too. Nonetheless, in our experience, traditional research often does little to bring the community onside. What’s missing is research that systematises the knowledge and political energy of the people who suffer the violence.
Take Roger Mac Ginty’s idea of ‘everyday peace’. It’s not less important because it’s every day, but more important because it’s the way in which situations of peace or insecurity come into being. If people’s efforts to make life safe and productive are well enough organised and powerful enough, then the place and people will be at peace. If they are constantly thwarted, then their distrust of the authorities and politicians will put them on the defensive – every day. More foot soldiers, more crime, more despair.
At least that is what Simon and his community colleagues found when they led community action research on the Uganda-Kenya border.
To read the full blog, visit the IDS website, where this was originally published.
After two decades of violent conflict in the city of Mosul, Iraq, Dr Omar Mohammed, founder of the Mosul Eye organisation, started a tree-planting initiative to help bring communities together. In the United States, Dr Marc Zimmerman examined how greening and improvement initiatives reduced crime in cities that had suffered economic decline.
In this episode, Dr Omar Mohammed and Dr Marc Zimmerman, interviewed by Dr Nafees Hamid, discuss the role of greening initiatives in these two different contexts, exploring how they can promote peace, build trust between communities and authorities, and help to increase resilience against violent crime and extremism.
You can also listen on the War Studies podcast page, where this was originally released.
Beirut is the posterchild for a divided city.[i] 15 years of fighting during Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990) saw the capital city split by ethnic, religious, and physical lines. These divisions did not end with the war. Over three decades later, sectarianism, segregation, economic inequality, and violence are a lasting part of Beirut’s post-war legacy.
The physical reconstruction of the city centre in post-war Beirut is believed to have played a role in these enduring divisions. When the reconstruction process began, many Beirutis saw it as an opportunity for society to heal. The public domain could be remade and revived, and in this way a space for reconciliation would be built.
Solidere building site in Beirut. Credit: Shutterstock/David Dennis
Instead, the work, which was carried out by the private company Solidere, has been accused of promoting a culture of ‘amnesia’ around the civil war, as well as exacerbating socio-economic divisions. When Solidere rebuilt Downtown Beirut, they sought to remove all physical remnants of the war. In their place, a shiny new imagined centre was built.
But burying traces of war does not necessarily mean the past is buried too – and failing to create a unified space may be contributing to a divided society.
Nejmeh Square in Downtown Beirut. Credit: Shutterstock/Sun_Shine
Solidere’s reconstruction process, which began shortly after the war ended, seemed set on destroying all traces of recent history, and streets and buildings quickly fell prey to the bulldozers. By 1993, 80 per cent of structures in Downtown were damaged irreparably – yet only a third of this had been caused by the war itself.[ii]
For many, Solidere’s reconstruction of Downtown is the embodiment of the state’s policy of amnesia. The Taif Accord signed in 1989 to formally end the civil war proclaimed that there was ‘no victor and no vanquished’ in Lebanon. It suggested no mechanism for dealing with the legacy of fighting, nor did it mention victims. By circumventing the issue of responsibility, the state could begin to move forward. At the same time, it encouraged a culture of forgetting, leading to accusations of a state-sponsored amnesia in the country. One activist noted that ‘the downtown is the core of the reconstruction ideology — that we don’t need to look at the past’.[iii]
It’s been claimed that, for ‘communities of difference’ to be successful, there must be a ‘studied historical absentmindedness’.[iv] Given a general amnesty law in 1991, a broadcasting censorship law in 1994, and a law in 1995 enabling ‘the missing’ to be classified as ‘dead’, it seems unlikely that remembering the past would yield justice in the present. This ‘amnesia’ could therefore help to promote harmonious co-existence.[v] For some, forgetfulness is seen as ‘an antidote to future conflict’.[vi]
Read the full blog on the ICSR website here.
