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Resuming Nuclear Talks with Iran: Too Late to Renegotiate?

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By Owen Saunders

Source: Antony Blinken’s confirmation hearing: 5 things to know about Biden’s secretary of state nominee

The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have endured continued tensions over the last forty years. The relationship has often been strained by disagreements over values, government structures, foreign interference, and ideological beliefs. A primary threat perceived by the United States in recent years has been Iran’s emerging capacity to produce enriched uranium, which can be used in the creation of nuclear weapons.  The formulation and negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which ended successfully in 2015, principally as a result of track two dialogues beginning in the early 2000s, was intended to address these latest pressures.

As background to the JCPOA, the election of President Hassan Rouhani in 2013 and the re-election of President Obama in 2012 presented an opportune moment wherein both sides were looking for new ideas and new ways forward in order to kickstart formal discussions around reaching a nuclear agreement. The JCPOA, in essence, was a deal whereby, in exchange for the lifting of the US’s longstanding and crippling economic sanctions, Iran agreed to limit its nuclear capabilities. For example, the agreement stated that Iran could have no more than 300 kilograms of enriched uranium at a maximum of 3.67 percent, and that the attainment of such quantities was to be verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Besides the two disputants, other parties to the JCPOA included all members of the Security Council (China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom) and Germany. 

After the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, his Administration targeted the JCPOA as one part of its agenda of projecting American strength and embracing isolationism. Trump was opposed to what he saw as the unnecessary compromises made by Obama, in much the same way that he was committed to undoing much of Obama’s domestic and other foreign initiatives. In regard to the JCPOA, Trump stated that: 

‘The Iranian regime supports terrorism and exports violence, bloodshed and chaos across the Middle East. That is why we must put an end to Iran’s continued aggression and nuclear ambition. They have not lived up to the spirit of their agreement.’ 

Trump went on to say, that if these issues were not resolved, the United States would withdraw from the agreement. Israel was another harsh critic of the deal, with Prime Minister Netanyahu arguing that Iran was able to circumvent the deal and would significantly increase production of a nuclear weapon.

American and European supporters of the JCPOA argued that the agreement was critical in upholding four objectives: nuclear nonproliferation, regional stability in the Middle East, restoration of U.S.-Iran bilateral relations (as well as the reintegration of Iran into the international community), and the promotion of ‘western’ human rights and democracy inside Iran. Critics, however, argued that the primary problem did not lie in the details of the agreement, but rather in what was left out of it, that being the threat posed by Iran’s geopolitical ambitions towards U.S. allies in the region. As for providing regional stability, they argued that Iran could not even effectively stabilize itself. Other criticisms focused on the possibility of U.S.-Iranian normalization, with some arguing that the animosity from and toward the United States would constitute an intractable obstacle in attempting to rectify their relationship. Finally, critics also purported that the Iranian regime was unreformable when it comes to human rights and democracy. As one critic noted, Iran is “a police state, incapable of reforming itself while drowning in corruption and economic ineptitude.”

These latter views had attracted little support during the Obama administration, but found strong support in the Trump administration, and the U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018. Once withdrawn, Trump not only re-imposed the previous sanctions but added new ones as well. As a result, Iran began to breach the constraints outlined within the JCPOA and has, since 2018, exceeded numerous limits on the stockpiling of low enriched uranium. 

U.S. disengagement and the concurrent reaction by Iran has raised major concerns for the remaining signatories of the JCPOA and has led to increasing tensions between Washington and Tehran.   Most recently, the Trump administration’s assassination of Iran’s General Qassim Soleimani, a powerful figure in Iran’s politics, sparked outrage and inflamed relations. After his death, Iran announced that it was abandoning the “final limitations in the nuclear deal,” which prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. However, Iran also stated that it would continue to cooperate with the IAEA and return to the original agreement should an American administration lift the economic sanctions and abide by the JCOPA. Iran’s Foreign Minister Zavad Zarif said that if the Biden administration lifts the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, and provides assurance that the United States will not leave the agreement in the same manner as the previous administration, the Iranian government would be willing to re-enter negotiations. 

On the U.S. side, Biden is open to re-joining the pact, but the issue is under what conditions and how to do so. The new U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is expected to meet with the foreign ministers of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom to discuss the United States’ re-entry into the agreement. The Biden Administration has also appointed Robert Malley, a senior official under both the Obama and Clinton Administrations, as an ‘Iran Envoy’ to aid in the effort. The primary challenge as re-negotiation moves forward will be to what extent the Biden Administration can push amendments to the original agreement, what degree of pushback will there be from the other parties to the JCPOA?

A successful re-entry into the agreement is, however, still uncertain. President Biden seeks to continue to rebuild the reputation of the United States on the world stage. The challenge will be to negotiate and successfully re-enter the agreement within a very short time frame –  by the 2022 midterms, the domestic landscape, international challenges, and congressional makeup could likely look very different. Although Biden is still in the first weeks of his mandate, time is already running out. Biden’s recent authorization of offensive air strikes on Iranian backed militias in Syria could create further tensions between the US and Iran, impacting the successful re-negotiation of the JCPOA.  

 

Owen is pursuing his MA in International Peace and Security in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. His interest in researching this topic developed from a Track Two Diplomacy course by Dr. Peter Jones at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Find him on Twitter @owensaunders26

Capturing the humanity of the Cold War

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By James Brown

A picture taken by renowned Czech photographer Viktor Kolar; his work captured the everyday experience in Ostrava, an important industrial town in communist Czechoslovakia. (Image: Viktor Kolar/Monovisions)

The history of the Cold War has a rich scholarship. The field encompasses International Relations studies, economic history, and, increasingly, cultural approaches, exploring the imprint of the conflict on art, film, and everyday life. Interest in books on the Cold War will likely increase this year as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And while narrative histories of high politics and culture no doubt assist in improving our understanding of the Cold War, the works which will be most important as we reflect on the conflict’s legacy are those dealing explicitly with the psychology and human impact of the Cold War. With the rise of China and continuing instability following the COVID-19 pandemic leading to repeated suggestions of the potential for a Second Cold War, most important in our engagement with the Cold War is appreciating the human mindsets which created that conflict, and those which it created amongst people in turn. We need to ask ourselves what led the world to be so divided for nearly half a century, and then how to avoid the same happening again.

Interrogating this aspect of Cold War history is indeed difficult and few authors truly succeed in illustrating the psychology of the era without resorting to cliche. The Cold War was a conflict defined by high politics and domineering ideologies of capitalism versus communism. Writers, especially academics, have found it hard to move beyond these abstractions to capture the human experience of the Cold War.

In this regard, it has been authors of fiction who have often been more successful. The works of the late great John le Carré endure in the popular imagination as among the most defining portraits of the moral compromises forced on individuals by the ideological restraints of the Cold War. Meanwhile, Francis Spufford’s fact-based novel, Red Plenty, gives insight into how Soviet citizens genuinely began to believe that communism’s material promises would be realised under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev (1956-64). In writing Red Plenty, Spufford, himself acknowledged the difficulties non-fiction authors face in trying to capture the essence of the Cold War’s ideas and their impact on people. He explains how his initial attempts to tell the tale of Red Plenty as a piece of non-fiction fell short and demanded he shift the book to the ‘border between fiction and non-fiction.’

Other Cold War authors, meanwhile, have successfully managed to bridge this gap between storytelling and fact while remaining truer to the latter. Among the most significant are Anna Funder, principally for her renowned book Stasiland, and the 2015 Nobel Literature Laureate, Svetlana Alexievich. These two authors are already widely acclaimed but it feels necessary to revisit their work as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the USSR, as they capture better than most the human impact of the Cold War, especially east of the Iron Curtain.

Funder’s brilliant Stasiland has been described variously as a personal history and a ‘journalist’s first-person narrative’ that can ‘read like a novel’. The book, through a series interviews intertwined with Funder’s own narrative, captures how the state ideology of the German Democratic Republic created an alternate, corrupt moral reality for its subjects and those who defended it: the notorious Ministry for State Security or Stasi. Funder, however, is not exclusively condemnatory of the former watchmen of state socialism. Her interviews are occasionally sympathetic with former Stasi employees, though without ever failing to address the violations they committed. On the other hand, Funder gives voice to those who resisted the regime and put themselves in extreme danger in desperate attempts to escape to the West. Funder’s main achievement is to shine a light on a society where ideology reigned supreme in a way it rarely does now, while still keeping the human experience firmly at the forefront of her prose.

Alexievich’s works, meanwhile, are less about how people were driven to extremes by ideology, and more about the everyday lives continuing in spite of or in accommodation with ideology. Alexievich’s method sees her conduct interviews with hundreds of witnesses to life in the USSR, focusing on formative events like the Great Patriotic War (1941-45), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-89), the Chernobyl Disaster (1986), and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991). Her excellent Secondhand Time tells the story of the end of communism in the USSR and the responses of its citizens. Alexievich lets her subjects speak for themselves, sympathising with them. What emerges is a portrait of how the Soviet people inhabited a distinct culture of their own in the USSR and that while the political reality of the Soviet Union may have ended in 1991, left behind were millions of Homo-Sovieticus traumatised by the sudden collapse of their generations-old everyday reality.   

If history is about authentically recreating the unique conditions of an era or culture, both Funder’s and Alexievich’s books stand as among the most accomplished studies of the Cold War, even though neither author may be exclusively considered a historian; two other worthy examples are Donald J. Raleigh’s Soviet Baby Boomers and Bridgett Kendall’s The Cold War. Furthermore, both women’s books hold relevance in understanding pertinent contemporary issues in international politics, especially Putin’s Russia and the historical factors which drive Russian foreign policy. 

Modern Russia cannot be understood without an appreciation of the impact on Russian leaders of the loss of superpower status conferred by the USSR’s collapse. Nor can the contemporary rise of the far-right in the east of Germany be understood without knowledge of East German history. Throughout the 2010s, and now in the first years of the 2020s, observers have continued to speculate whether we have entered a new Cold War-style period of international relations. Understanding the human experience of the original Cold War seems a more important exercise than ever as we prepare ourselves for the new era, whatever it brings, and Funder and Alexievich offer the best place to start.

 

James Brown is a PhD candidate in history at Northumbria University. His focus is on Soviet dissidents and their use in the politics and international relations of the Cold War. He previously studied at Glasgow University, doing a Master’s in East European, Russian, and Eurasian studies. During this time he studied Russian and wrote his thesis, ‘Returning to Machiavelli: Giving Belarus-Russia relations the Original Realist Treatment’, which received the prize for best dissertation from the Centre for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at Glasgow.

At Northumbria, he is a member of several research groups, including the Conflict & Society and Histories of Activism groups. James also has a keen interest in literature, especially Czech writers, and had a poem on Jan Palach published in Edge Magazine. Additionally, he remains interested in the Chernobyl disaster, on which he wrote his undergraduate thesis, ‘A Long Half-Life: Responses to Chernobyl in Soviet and Post-Soviet Society’.

The Overextension of Sovereignty: How states have dampened opposition to annexation

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by Andrew Scanlon

Kremlin Dome of Senate. Photo Credit: iStockPhoto.

In the twenty-first century the calculation that war is too costly to pursue in the conventional manner has kept large scale inter-state conflict from occurring. States are no longer willing to send tanks rolling across borders to invade neighboring countries. The military, economic, and political cost/benefit analyses simply do not justify those actions in the present state of international relations. Yet, this does not cure a state’s appetite to expand its control in favor of pursuing its national interest. However, it does shift the strategy used to expand its presence. The use of proxies to engage on behalf of a state has been documented in conflicts such as the ongoing war in Yemen. A number of states utilize this strategy to pursue plausible deniability. An alternative method to mollify the international community over aggressive actions has been increasing in prevalence – extending sovereignty over peoples or structures outside of their present jurisdiction in order to more forcefully justify the aggressor’s presence. By over-extending their claim of sovereignty, these states attempt to shift the perception of their actions from aggressors to defenders and dampen any possibility of a united front willing to confront their activities. We have seen this strategy play out in Crimea and eastern Ukraine under President Vladimir Putin in 2014, and more recently in the South China Sea and the Himalayas by President Xi Jinping.

The Russian case in Ukraine

The Russian Black Sea Fleet’s continued access to naval bases in warm-water ports in Crimea and Russia’s support for the fiercely pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych were national interests, but a traditional military incursion into Ukraine would have triggered costly consequences. Instead, Vladimir Putin began using rhetoric related to the protection of ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Following violence in Kiev, Putin declared that “We understand what worries the citizens of Ukraine, both Russian and Ukrainian, and the Russian-speaking population in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine… we retain the right to use all available means to protect those people. We believe this would be absolutely legitimate.” After mass protests in Kiev and the formation of pro-Russian separatist militias in Ukraine, Putin used the doctrine of Protecting Nationals Abroad (PNA) as justification for sending military supplies to separatists and deploying “little green men” into Crimea and eastern Ukraine. But many of these people Putin claimed to protect were not citizens, but merely ethnic Russians or Russian-speaking peoples. Whether the doctrine of PNA is lawful or simply tolerated, its traditional application has been to citizens, not foreign nationals with ancestry to the state utilizing the doctrine. Nevertheless, in 2019, Putin issued a decree allowing close to 3.5 million people living in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donbass and Luhansk to obtain Russian passports and brings Putin’s actions closer to those previously allowed by the international community.

Putin did not stop at protecting ethnic Russians. He also used historical claims to justify retaking territory. In a speech to a joint session of parliament asking for the formal annexation of Crimea, Putin professed “All these years, citizens and many public figures came back to this issue, saying that Crimea is historically Russian land and Sevastopol is a Russian city. Yes, we all knew this in our hearts and minds”. Russia’s relinquishing of Crimea to Ukraine, in the process suffering a ‘historical wronging’, and its subsequent use as a rationalization to retake territory followed the framework of previous annexations. A number of international leaders compared the move to Hitler’s annexation of Sudetenland in 1938. The UN General Assembly has adopted resolutions urging Russia to withdraw military forces from Crimea and supplies from going to eastern Ukraine. A certain amount of backlash was inevitable following the annexation of territory, but Putin would have been naïve to believe that there would have been silence after such a move. However, other than remarks by world leaders and a number of U.S. and EU economic sanctions, Putin has been relatively free to pursue his interests in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. His use of the PNA doctrine and historical sovereignty over territory allowed him to keep the conflict, and ensuing fallout, below a level of escalation consistent with traditional military invasions.

China’s Mountain and Sea Strategy

While Russia has used the PNA doctrine as justification for interference into neighboring countries, China has used infrastructure. In the South China Sea, the Nine Dash Line asserted by China encompasses vast majorities of the sea that extend far beyond the usual exclusive-economic zones given to each state as a result of the United Nation’s Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Chinese explanations for this broad claim are based on historical use of the sea by China dating back thousands of years. In modern times, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s Navy (PLAN) has been constructing artificial islands in the South China Sea since 2013, allowing them to issue claims of sovereignty over disputed territory. In April, China created two new administrative districts in the South China Sea. This month, China drafted a new law that would expand the Chinese Coast Guard’s ability to enforce its sovereignty over the islands, permitting them to destroy foreign construction on islands claimed by Beijing and fire weapons on foreign ships.

China has now duplicated this strategy on land. In recent weeks, China completed the initial construction of a new village where the borders of India, Bhutan, and China meet in the Himalayan Mountains. This came after a June border clash in the Ladakh region of the Himalayas, near Kashmir, that resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese casualties. The new Chinese village is reported to be constructed within the territory of Bhutan, just south of the Doklam Plateau. Bhutan and China have been engaged in territorial disputes for nearly 35 years, much of which is focused on the western regions of Bhutan. The Doklam plateau is strategically significant for India’s continued access to its eight northeastern states, as well as their land borders with Bhutan and Myanmar. Under Chinese control, they would have the ability to block this access. The new Chinese village may only be the first in a series, much like the artificial islands, that would give China anchor points to protect the ‘sovereignty’ of Chinese territory or peoples.

These anchor points are core components to the strategy of Chinese expansion. States, including Australia, Japan, Vietnam, and Malaysia, are concerned with a resurgent China, its brazen aggression, and the potential of forceful annexation of territory. These fears present a major diplomatic challenge to China’s longer-term strategy. [[i]] Therefore, China has attached rhetoric to provocative actions in an attempt to alleviate concerns over their rise, engaging in a “rhetorical trap”. China has used rhetoric such as ‘China’s peaceful rise’ to assuage fears over actions that would otherwise seem more hostile. The rhetoric emphasizes the protection of sovereign entities, instead of engaging in military conflict on existing territory of sovereign states. This rhetoric has typically been utilized around actions in the South China Sea, but Beijing may begin using similar terminology regarding its efforts in the Himalayas.

Both the Russian and Chinese strategies are aimed at expanding territorial control without the stigma or risk of conventional conflict over existing territory, structures, or peoples. This shifts the conflict from a conventional military one to a more hybrid model that incorporates higher levels of rhetoric and international public opinion. Both the Russian and Chinese approaches try to build a framework that give them a defensive right to use force instead of an aggressive seizure of territory. While these strategies have allowed Russia and China to extend their ambitions over neighboring territories, how long will it take for their neighbors, and world leaders, to effectively respond to these enigmatic strategies… if ever?

 

[i] For more on the diplomatic challenges facing China in Asia over their renewed presence as a great power, Anisa Heritage and Pak K. Lee (2020) use an international order perspective to analyze the tension in the South China Sea, available here.

Andrew Scanlon is a MSc candidate in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh and an External Representative at Strife. Prior to postgraduate studies, he completed is B.A. in Political Science from the University of Dayton. During his undergraduate, Andrew worked for the Ohio Attorney General’s office and in the United States House of Representatives. His areas of research interest includes blockchain and its use as a tool for diplomacy, the impacts of the conflict in the South China Sea on the current international order, and international political economy.

Normative Approaches versus Inclusive Peacebuilding in Afghanistan

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by Catharine Helmers

(Image credit: Casey Johnson)

Local ownership as a tenet of external intervention and peacebuilding has been a key point of debate for many years now, although its meaning and implications have long been contested. While many within the international community use the term as though it was universally understood, ‘local ownership remains remarkably understudied and, to date, understandings of ownership have been based primarily on assumptions and normative beliefs held broadly in both the policy and academic communities,’ as von Billerbeck notes.

The term must be conceptually flexible, adaptable to the situational and cultural context in which it is being applied, but can be understood broadly as mechanisms and systems by which some level of decision-making power and influence over ‘both the design and implementation’ of the peacebuilding process resides with domestic actors. In order for local legitimacy to exist, the primary audience and judgement-maker for legitimacy must be the local/target population. This article will establish and problematize the prevailing approach to local ownership in peacebuilding, examining the failures and ramifications of the peacebuilding process in Afghanistan in order to point to an alternative approach.

The prevailing approach to constructing local ownership in peacebuilding has been a normative one, noted by Zaum and von Billerbeck, often excluding local actors who may be representative of communities on the ground or have local authority but do not fit the Western image of a legitimate peacebuilder. By excluding illiberal actors from having a seat at the table, the international community severely limits who can take part in peacebuilding in post-conflict contexts. Although this normative approach is morally understandable, it undermines an intervention’s practical ability to build peace by denying local ownership in the process to key actors, thus reducing local legitimacy. As lessons from Afghanistan show, it is dangerous to exclude ‘bad actors’ from the peacebuilding process.

Case Study: Afghanistan

In 2001, after removing the Taliban from power in Kabul, the US-led coalition faced a new challenge: to rebuild the Afghan state. When it was decided what actors would be involved in these peacebuilding efforts as part of the Bonn Agreement, the Taliban was excluded, as it was not viewed by the international community (the UN and US in particular) as a legitimate actor deserving of ownership in the peace process in wake of its decisive military defeat.

Because of this, as Jonathan Goodhand and Mark Sedra discuss, the Bonn agreement ‘was a not a peace accord between belligerents, but an externally driven division of the spoils among a hand­picked group of stakeholders who were on the right side of the War on Terror.’ As illustrated by a study conducted by The Inclusive Peace & Transition Initiative, not only was the Taliban excluded from the peacebuilding process, but the very actors selected were chosen because of their opposition to the Taliban.

The reality, for better or worse, is that the Taliban, although fractured after the collapse of its regime, was still a crucial actor in the power dynamics of Afghanistan at the time of Bonn and thus should not have been ignored due to its apparent incompatibility with liberal values. Timor Sharan summarizes the failure of Bonn, which ‘did not necessarily reflect the general Afghan demographic balance, or even the political power of the factions, but the internationally sponsored military successes of the [Northern Alliance]’.

By excluding the Taliban, the interveners not only reduced the effectiveness of their reconstruction efforts, but also the legitimacy of the new governing system. To many Afghans, the normative justification given for excluding the Taliban must have seemed hypocritical, as other illiberal actors were included in the process, such as ‘Mujahedeen factions…many of whom were suspected to be guilty of human rights abuses and war crimes.’ Normative determinations of the legitimacy of local actors were not based on the values they were claimed to be, and were therefore not just ineffective and unrealistic, but contradictory.

What were the impacts of this approach to local ownership in peacebuilding? During the next nineteen years of war after Bonn, external interveners continued to lose legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan population as they focused on self-legitimizing their peacebuilding efforts instead of seeking local legitimacy, a problem extending to the UN as well. A 2009 poll showed that Afghan support for and confidence in the US-led intervention continued to decline as the intervention went on, and the Taliban continued to vie for territorial control year after year, threatening peace and security. The failure to understand the local context and to recognize the power dynamics on the ground lead to the overall failure of the peacebuilding intervention.

Today, the Taliban has gotten its day at the negotiating table, with arguably more bargaining power than ever. Even as peace talks continue, the Taliban continues to engage in ever-increasing levels of violence. Although the U.S. military stopped measuring the number of districts under insurgent control as of 2019, it has been estimated that the Afghan government now controls less than 50 percent of Afghan districts, with the rest either under Taliban control or contested. The future of Afghan peace remains uncertain, but what is clear that the Taliban will have a major role in shaping the post-war landscape. Perhaps if they had been included in the peacebuilding process from the start, the situation in Afghanistan would be a different one. In excluding the Taliban on normative grounds, the intervention undermined its own chances to create sustainable peace and security.

So how should external interveners decide what actors to bring to the table to construct real local ownership? The answer must lie in analyses of local power structures and systems of representation instead of in the norms and values of the outside intervening forces. External interveners must depart from the prevailing norms-based approach to constructing local ownership, instead of working within the existing ground-level dynamics of power and representation.

In a post-conflict context, this will often, if not always, mean the inclusion of illiberal actors. Although this approach may delay the pace of peacebuilding, a slower and more complicated peacebuilding process that includes tangible forms of local ownership is better than an externally imposed, norms-focused process that is unlikely to be viable in the long run. If future interventions are to have any hope of success, local ownership in peacebuilding must be constructed by prioritizing the inclusion of locally legitimate actors, regardless of the normative determinations of the external interveners.

Catharine Helmers recently completed her master’s thesis for the M.A. in International Conflict Studies programme at King’s College London, where she examined the role of emotional conditioning in facilitating atrocities by sub-Saharan African rebel groups. She currently serves as Coordinating Assistant for the Urban Violence Research Network. You can find Catharine on Twitter @cat_helmers

Book Review: ‘Breaking Hate’

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by Isabela Betoret Garcia

 

Christian Picciolini. Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism. Hachette Books, London, 2020. ISBN 978-0316522939. Pp. 272. Hardcover, £22.85.

Stories about the alt-right rarely have happy endings. Many associate the movement with white supremacists, those men and women who have left a path of violence and death in their wake. Connotations of ‘white supremacy’ tend to include men marching in a university campus in well-tailored trousers and neat haircuts chanting propaganda, such as the ones that marched in Charlottesville; or perhaps the young men who perpetrated unspeakable acts of violence in houses of worship, like Dylann Roof did in Charleston when he massacred nine people or the Christchurch Mosque Shooting where 51 were murdered. The image conjured up is that of hate, a hate that is so unforgiving to those in its path that it does not invite any kind of compassion. Yet, that is exactly what author and activist Christian Picciolini asks of us in his latest book: Breaking Hate.

Picciolini was born to Italian immigrants, in Illinois; by the age of 14 he had joined one of the most violent racist groups in the United States, the Chicago Area Skinheads. By 16 he had become the leader of the group, as well as formed a white supremacist punk band, W.A.Y (White American Youth). Even though he left the movement at 22, he had spent eight years helping it grow. Such a drastic U-turn came, he claims, from interactions he had with the people he had been conditioned to hate – black, Jewish, and homosexual people – and finding some common ground which left him unable to justify his hate. After leaving his former violent life, having spent some years in a dark space of apathy and depression by his own admission, he began to do what became his life’s calling: telling his story. His first book, White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement— and How I Got Out, focused on his life. Picciolini seemed to understand that for people to truly believe that his theory of de-radicalisation could work, they had to understand how he had come to believe in them himself.

Breaking-Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism serves both as a culmination and as a new chapter. A culmination in that it is not only a collection of stories of men and women Christian has helped de-radicalise; it also allows Christian to share the steps of extremist disengagement he has come to believe. With each new chapter, however, it becomes clear to the reader that there is much work to be done, and that extremism really is an embedded cultural problem.

Christian’s proposal is clear: No one is born into hate, and violent ideologies are not what lead people down the road of extremism. When someone encounters what he calls ‘potholes’ in life, they will be in danger of never fulfilling their sense of identity, community, and purpose (ICP). De-Radicalisation is a contested concept with no single accepted process, and many doubt the effectiveness of it. In the field of de-radicalisation many scholars such as Daniel Koeher have pointed to ideology as a key aspect in the road to radicalisation. Picciolini’s theory differs significantly. It is when they trip on their search of ICP that extremism may find them, but ideology itself is the last step. Only by listening to their stories and identifying these potholes, presumably extraordinary patience and compassion, one can extend a hand to bring them back to a normal life. The process he uses includes 7 steps: Link, Listen, Learn, Leverage, Lift, Love, Live. These steps are meant to form a link with the subject, understand how their path in life brought them to radicalisation, help them make amends, and eventually life free. Though his argument is fascinating and compelling, Picciolini does not spend much time discussing alternative theories of de-radicalisation that have an ideological basis, which would lend more credibility to his argument.

“The answer is love”: the message could not be more clear (Image credit: Christian Picciolini)

The structure of the book relies on the reader connecting with the stories told within. From veterans and men recruited in prison, to a former ISIS fighter, to a seventeen year-old girl caught in a scam that seemed to lead all the way to the 2016 Presidential election— the stories Christian relates are raw and tender. They are simultaneously full of sorrow, anger, and hope. Yet there are underlining reminders that even if disengagement is successful, the subjects of the book may be atoning for their actions for the rest of their lives.

The message of the book is, for the most part, effectively conveyed and persuasive. Because most of the subjects Christian examines in the book were part of the Alt-Right we might ask if ideology truly does not matter as much as other experts say in the de-radicalisation process, and the book would benefit from exploring other theories for Picciolini to more effectively defend his own. The book’s persuasiveness does rely on the author himself, and on the anecdotal evidence he provides of the cases present in the text, which could be more effective if paired with quantifiable evidence of the success of his methods. Upon closing the book, however, a reader will likely reconsider any previously held notions on the psychology of radicalisation which rely on ideology and be willing to consider compassion, and in this point the book is undeniably successful.

Picciolini admits to sometimes almost losing patience, hope, and control when trying to help extremists disengage. But here is where he comes to the most important lesson of all: see the child, not the monster. This is not meant to excuse the actions of extremists because of the abuse they may have suffered, the severe lack of ICP that delivered them into the arms of hate. But rather to remember that basic premise, that no one is born into hate; and if they find their way into it, they can find their way out.

Isabela first completed a Foundation Programme in International Relations and is now a third-year War Studies and History BA. She also works as an International Relations and Politics Tutor for King’s Foundations. She is Mexican-Spanish and lived most of her life in Mexico until she moved to London, and this background has given her a keen interest in migration. She is also interested in how the every-day has become politicised through media, and what this means for the future of journalism and politics. You can follow her on Twitter @isa_betoret.