My name is John Wilson. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the UW Program on the Project, Architect of Peace on the Columbia Peace Process.
And it's my great pleasure to introduce Professor Neil Ferguson,
professor of political psychology at the Little Hope University, and to the Tuesday seminars time serious.
And as a researcher and as a visiting researcher fellow he's not a stranger to CCW and and that's to quickly go through the usual Professor
Ferguson has published quite widely in both psychology and political journalists and most others published in the Journal of Journalism,
Mass Communication, Quality, Democracy and Security. Political Psychology, International Journal of Conflict and Violence.
Peace and Conflict Journal of Peace Psychology. Peace Research.
International Journal of Behavioural Development and Political Psychology to just name a few.
And, and this is, of course his work has appeared and numerous edits volume and he himself has edited quite a few volumes
on the psychology of becoming a combatant in the process of after violence has ceased and today's
presentation falls into the second category and explores the processes involved in leaving social movements
or disengaging from terrorist activities towards engaging in non-military sorts of civil society.
And so the most interesting approach of this research is that it combines macro processes taking place
and at the institutional level with microprocessors taking place at the group or individual level.
And it is therefore not surprising that he not only made scholarly contribution, but has advised various governments,
NGOs, think tanks and so forth on issues around radicalisation of terrorism and counter-terrorism.
And I have of course very self interest in the issue, you know, studying Columbia.
Yeah, because Columbia is facing and of course they have clearly a task of transforming a forest
into a that is an experience of six decades of jungle warfare into a legal political force.
And but whatever your regional interests may be, Professor Ferguson,
Holbrooke has made it relatively readily apparent that his findings are applicable to other contexts other than Northern Ireland.
So I'm sure we will learn a lot from today's presentation and we have an equally vibrant discussion.
And let's welcome Professor Ferguson to Oxford University.
Thanks for China. Thanks so much for getting your time to come along to the talk show.
We said we're going to look are going to have a look at sort of the end cycle against people leaving violence behind.
So uncomfortable, I guess try to look at the sort of issues around de-radicalization, disengagement from violence,
thinking about, I guess, come from a terrorism studies perspective, a psychologist at heart.
So it's hardly surprised anybody. But since 9/11, been a huge growth in interest issues, right?
Terrorism, radicalisation, de-radicalization, I mean, to extent that you can't read everything as published anymore,
there's just so much material getting published, particularly around issues around radicalisation.
It's also very true that this work is generally very, very poor,
less reliance on secondary data sites that wouldn't really engaged in work in the field,
people into looping, coming in, writing attacks, getting off again, going back to whatever it is to do for the day job.
So the work hasn't really grown and the sort of significance in that time,
particularly while at the same time there is kind of a growing awareness of the complexity of the problem across three research become more complex,
more nuanced, the range of factors that are being considered, what is more widespread, particularly on the radicalisation side.
So how do people get involved with armed groups? How do people engage in the violence?
The factors that lead into that has got a lot more consideration and the models that are being are been
developed that are getting a little bit more sophisticated in terms of how people leave violence behind,
de-radicalize or de disengage from violence. It's much more limited.
But again, it's beginning to grow the body of work as well, but not as sophisticated and terms as the radicalisation literature.
So what are the issues in this area,
this big debate about whether we need something called de-radicalisation or what is it or can we have disengagement,
this idea that if we want people to leave violence behind, we have to de-radicalize them.
Okay, so things to think about. So we think of disengagement as what I'm mainly told by today is that people who have a behavioural change,
i.e. they don't kill people anymore because they've stopped the violence that that robin people that are involved in the criminality,
the moving away from that. So it's behavioural change as you'll see has to go through that arc and they feel like radicalised.
If anything, the process of their engagement of violence has radicalised them more and the more radical at the end than they were at the beginning.
We also have de-radicalisation, which is, I guess this basic is this idea that we have both this cognitive change and the behavioural change.
So people change the reasons for doing it. There's a change in why they're doing it.
Ideological shift. And what I really wanna look at is this idea that I personally as we'll see,
I don't really think that de-radicalisation is a necessary and this route towards ending violent extremism okay
we could deal with it disengage would begin this is very simple look at all these topics and much more nuanced,
much more complicated than I give them time for an eye. Okay, so look at the overview.
How does this engagement work? Basically, it's lots of different factors.
You have your societal level factors, your community level factors.
You've got the personal life, the individual and individual integrate.
All this kind of process are involved in it.
But you can break it down to the sort of steps either the individual combatant decides he or she has had enough and is going to stop killing people.
It's got to stop getting engaged in this terrorism or terrorist activity or
paramilitary activity or as we've probably seen more so in Northern Ireland,
we have a group level disengagement. The group itself, for a variety of reasons, have decided that militarism is not the way forward.
We need to go into community work. We do go to politics. We need to go to other fields.
I'll leave the violence behind. And again, people do this for a variety of reasons.
One, you can voluntary do that. So your group itself could decide, well, we're not going to achieve our political goals by using violence.
We need to find new ways of moving forward or it's forced.
So basically there is decapitation of your organisation leaderships killed off
the organisation fractures and Brexit has been forced to the disengagement.
And again these processes as we'll see, can be temporary.
So people will come in, leave the organisation, maybe go to prison after their imprisonment,
leave the organisation, get themselves a nice job as a shopkeeper, for example.
Then after a while come back into the organisation, get involved, the political side or welfare or back into the military side and things like that.
Or they could be permanent. I mean, the easiest way to bring about permanent disengagement is obviously to kill the person.
So once they're killed or permanent, I think it's not going to do it again. Okay.
But for most people, it's a very nebulous activity. People drift and drift out over time.
So we break through the processes. We can look at it a bit like that.
So if you look across the literature in this area, there's a number of sort of common factors that people cite.
We try to understand why people leave these armed groups or why these armed groups might fold.
One of the arguments really is that basically the organisations will collapse, the people will all leave.
So, you know, if you get injured, most people who get involved in armed groups,
a young man who cannot be a success, but the young man, they get involved in their teenage years,
their early and then early twenties, and basically through their life,
the priorities will change and eventually, off their own will, they'll stop doing it.
Okay. A lot of factors plan for that. Things like physical, psychological and socioeconomic.
We'll talk about that as we go through the talk, because these are key factors for the people who have involved research that I'm going to talk about.
It's hard work.
You know, if you're on the run from the security agency, the agency, the security services, the police agencies are disrupting you and harassing you,
perhaps just threats to your life from people within your own organisation, people from oppositional organisations you're in.
You're not seeing your family. You can't get a job, you can't hold down a job.
There's all these sort of problems, a lot of psychological physical pressure and socio economic pressure factor.
We'll see it as important as ageing. You know, you grew up, you have kids, your life kind of changes to this,
changing your life priorities, the things that were important to you when you're 15, 16,
not sort of important to you in a 34,
45 or whatever happens to be one of the companies said a factor is this idea that you lose faith of the group ideology.
You realise when you get onto the battlefield to join the group that they're
not really stand up for things that you thought they were going to stand up.
Maybe they're more interested in money or dealing drugs or whatever it happens to be.
You know, perhaps if you go off to you mention Afghanistan or you get stuck in Afghanistan, you're back in a truck, in a missile head.
Do you think maybe not the best thing to do, you know, to get involved in these groups.
Like any sort of job dissolution, the group dynamics, the people you work with, you don't get on with these sort of issues, very personal issues,
issues around one of the common ideas, this idea that the violence itself, after a while you get sort of sickened by the violence.
They realise that the violence is counterproductive to achieving the group goals, your political goals and things like that.
So these are kind of common factors that people see within lots of different groups here and
get some politically motivated violence and we'll see some of them as we go through today.
So the groups I'm particularly going to talk about today are the UVF and the are hits, see.
So basically this is the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Red Hand Commandos pick any of the groups from Northern Ireland that we're going to look at.
These groups, unlike the IRA, were pro-British.
Okay. So they're basically trying to maintain using violence to maintain the status
quo in Northern Ireland to keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom.
So some people would have see them as conservative, are preservation terrorists if you would label them.
If you look at what they did during the conflict over the duration of the troubles,
that 1700 people were killed, depending on how you count it and who you include.
But you can say that loyalist paramilitaries killed almost 30% of of those victims.
Most of the victims of the kill as well are civilians and not necessarily members of the IRA or Republicans, but general civilians.
The groups themselves went on cease fire in 1994.
The leadership of the group through was very pro agreement.
So during the peace negotiations and the mid to late 1993, very pro agreement, looking to move forward and move into peace processes.
Ten years ago, the joint leadership of the Youth for the Red Hand Commando said that they were going to a seminar on military civilian rule.
They were going to stop and engage in military activity.
Recall who becomes involved in more like community activism, community work, local politics, things like that.
Then two years later, the commission older weapons are apparently commission on the weapons systems first verified that they had done so.
But just a year later, the murdered there was a sanctioned murder of Bobby Moffitt, who was a and also had been a UVF member.
And it has riled up some other members of the leadership.
So clearly, the commission, all of their weaponry since then, they've been involved in paramilitary style attacks.
She was the sort of punishment, beatings and things like that involved in coordinating the sectarian rallies,
particularly around the flag protests that we had in Belfast involved the political protest,
but also involved in bringing about solutions to some of the political protest.
If think of the they took it to the Twidale Avenue protests and things like that,
they were very instrumental in bringing this to an end as well as that they have been targeting the republic.
And so although on paper they're supposed to get up this militarism,
there has been a big debate within the organisation about what the response would be to Irish distance in the Irish Republic and if they're committed,
for example, if they killed other loyalists or killed lawlessness and things like that.
So they've been involved in kind of targeting intelligence gathering and things like that on potential targets in the community.
And quite recently then,
the high command of actually applied to the surface did have the proscribed status from they've said it won't become a legal organisation
able to operate under the label of Red Hand Commando and do the community work and coffee transformation work under this label.
Okay. So that's currently where we are in a field of talk, some red commando members recently.
So if you want to talk about that later, I'm happy to talk about why they're doing this at a later date.
So what are the factors that are really people push people to kind of begin to move away?
As I said already, it's hard work. So ageing is an important process in two ways.
One, you get older, so you kind of malodorous, your guy says, you know, evaluate, you become wiser, you think things through a little bit better.
You're not as hotheaded. This might happen in your youth, but also has an impact in terms of your your ability to operate in the field.
So if you've gone to prison, you know, what are the security services? You know, it's the place.
You know, you're going to get caught, you know, good doing that kind of work anymore.
People know who you are, so you're not as effective in your field craft as you could have been.
You know, people would joke and say things like, well, you know, at my age, you're not going to make the getaway car anymore.
You know, you're not going to do that run, you know.
So there's always kind of physical changes, psychological changes, changes in where you are in your life interest as well.
I mean, if you look at a lot of research about how people get engaged with these groups, family,
friendship groups, these kind of things are very important in people's roots and armed groups.
If you look at people, for example, who travel to Syria to join ISIS, most people,
the little cliques of people, individual friendship groups and things like that.
Seven Northern Ireland Family of friendships. Very important but interesting as well when people look at how they've come out of the organisation.
And those relationships again are quite central and supporting that activity.
So I was quite surprised when I was doing this research.
How many of these former loyalist combatants, former ex-prisoners,
these are people who have been served long sentences for sectarian related crimes, are not in romantic relationships with Catholic women.
Okay. So this kind of change, but also you can see this guy is talking about, you know, you know, sometimes it took violence to push the law that way.
But everything I've done, you know, I've justified them anger.
And it's not been, I think, either to have peace, but have a good society for all of north.
And it's kind of counter intuitive idea that the violence in some way was there to bring about peace.
But Vernon will probably talk about this again, this idea,
but this sort of idea of not wanting the next generation to have to perpetrate that violence,
that you've had to witness the brutality of the violence. You've seen France killed, you've done killing your psychologically harmed.
I mean, I think about 40% of the population have GHQ scores that indicate they've got mental health issues.
PTSD, probably about 50% put through some symptomology of PTSD.
So these are very harmed population. So they don't want all the people have to live through that.
So it's a kind of an issue, but not one the conflict to go on again for the.
The children of North Nelson for children more generally,
but also for the children they have had as if grown up their own children, grandchildren, things like that.
One of the key issues for my population was prison in terms of how they got to move in
from a militaristic point of view to trying to solve the conflict through violence,
to trying to solve the conflict through negotiation and peace was really going to prison.
Okay. So and some of the other other research should have looked at how people got involved.
When they get involved in violence or politically naive, they don't have a notion.
They're not educated. Some of them are very, very, very poorly educated.
No historical knowledge about Northern Ireland and the really getting involved in violence at the very local level, the Roma gangs.
These things happen in the streets, these things happen in the area and they get brought into the violence like that.
It's not really thought out political violence as such. Okay.
But when they go to prison, there's a kind of a space to think and also some a cease fires do the same thing.
The provider provide the groups, the combatant groups with the space to come together, reformulate the ideas and think of a longer term strategy.
Okay. So when you're in the hot conflict, all you're thinking about is how do I kill X?
How do I stop actually killing me? So it's a very, very, very, very short termism and term issue if you're strategic.
So a prison gives people to sit back, reflect, think of the bigger picture, do some education.
Think of it widely says this. I said you.
Some people say the likes of them is from places like that where universities of terrorism,
a common phrase people use about the base and the retirees training camps.
But I actually believe the university is a piece in terms of how we discussed in there,
how we decided, how we came about in our discussions, how are we going to get ideas. Okay.
So they give people a space and the resources to think about this.
Okay? So people in a way got radicalised in prison, politically radicalised,
ideologically radicalised, but it helped them move towards peace, not away from peace.
So again, is an example of that, how these processes work.
We have this kind of growing political radicalisation people are looking towards.
I mean, if Republican prisoners, you're looking at Che Guevara,
you're looking at socialism, you're looking at all these different ideas, political ideas,
and you're looking at different education, you're reading different policy documents, are analysing and policy documents, doing critical evaluation.
You're coming together in discussion groups. What's going on? How do we move forward?
How do we change? You reflect on of why you got there.
Why did you do that attack? Why were you involved in that violence?
What were your motivations? What are you trying to achieve? And also within the prison, you're also negotiating with prison authorities.
You're learning these skills, negotiation skills. You're also negotiating with other armed groups that are in different wings.
So understand the world from their perspective as well.
You begin to sort of develop your skills, your negotiation skills, your educational skills, your historical outlet, your political acumen.
So it really helps people move forward.
And again, it's cool to sort of illustrate that, you know, I went to prison in 1980 and if you've any sort of matter in your head for all,
you have to start analyse where you finish up in prison just by thinking.
My thought was this reinforced by the fact that everything wasn't as black and white as I had seen it.
Prison just gives you an opportunity to touch from it. It's a dubious way to be attached, but your detach from it.
I give you time to think. Okay, so I did. You know, once you go in, you get that space.
You could bring people together, get a critical mass of people to discuss ideas.
And as I said, if you go outside, people don't understand that because they're still involved,
the short term [INAUDIBLE] for tat violence cycle, so they can develop their political ideas.
They're on the run. They're hiding from the police. And the security agencies are planning operations.
They're not really thinking of a bigger and a bigger and have a bigger viewpoint, whereas prison give these people the time to do that.
So anyway, what I'm saying is, well, let's radicalisation people have this political radicalisation,
ideological awakening that comes with in prison when you see them outside of
prison that also that begins to that's the thing that's fuelling their activity,
the conflict transformation activity.
So why are doing community work, why they're running football clubs at 12:00 at night on Friday to take these off the street,
why they're doing these educational projects, why they're doing welfare with prisoners, why they work with bands,
to try to get bands to understand legislation, why they're doing all this work and a lot of stuff to do with this kind of skills
that were developed within their time in prison and that sort of political ideology.
So anyway, here you see, this is a former prisoner.
He's talking about working with the group of young adolescents, and he's trying to get them to understand that the conflict wasn't glorious.
You know, you get the murals on the wall showing you the people with balaclavas and the rifles and glorify.
In the past conversations with the parents,
we talked about the good old days and the conflict is all of what happened and how people could leave the doors open and all these kind of things.
And this kind of challenge, these ideas about high conflict isn't glorious.
The higher the conflict actually can be very, very destructive and anarchy.
And this comes this this sort of process of imprisonment and trying to reimagine new future for peoples, their families and their other kin as well.
So what I'm saying is, you know, what is this process in some respects?
If you look at the essentially, you could argue that there's an element of de-radicalization there and that, you know,
they're not killing people anymore, that it is a change, but it's certainly a kind of a more liberalisation of people's attitudes have changed.
And as I said, they are on the way up today. You know, a lot of these people in a way, go to prison with very dehumanised ideas about the opponent.
Okay. So, you know, all Catholics are targets.
You know, if you calculate IRA kill at KG and they're all the same vocabulary, very dehumanised,
individualised when they go to prison, begin negotiations and talk to people that helps them re individualise the opponent,
they begin to understand them better the study them to see them differently and their attitudes change as well towards the opponent groups.
So as you said, you can see that change within this person is talking about, you know, obviously being a soldier.
So this is somebody who is dialogue is part of military but has been a former British army soldier.
So obviously, being a soldier and having a lot of heart come from soldiers and family getting killed by the IRA,
I was obviously I couldn't stand the sight of the other community. I didn't know them.
I didn't particularly want to know them. All I seen was the heart that that caused our community from that.
For that now it's the total opposite, I believe, a more sort of liberal, unless the people's belief, even if you don't agree with them, accept them.
RAZ Well, I would have thought before the violence we saw things.
Now, I think the complete opposite. It has to be done in a more democratic, where there has to be a system, etc., etc.,
because that sort of challenge where people are become very humanised as well.
This process key to, I guess, a lot of the change within these armed groups was the leadership,
the fact that a lot of people at the top were by peace process, certainly not all the rank and file were peace process supporters.
A lot of you would have been very against that.
But the leadership was there trying to keep the organisations coherent and trying to get them to transform away from violence,
move away from militarism of criminality, try to move into this more civilian ized kind of role.
That's just so much to try to explain of how we tried to get back to normality.
How do you leave away, get away,
get away from these sort of trappings of paramilitarism and try to bring the organisation forward into a sort of more peaceful, long conflict road.
One of the key aspects of this whole process is a sense of identity.
Okay, so within Northern Ireland, a very entrenched sense of identity within the population.
So if you particularly back at the during the conflict, if you said to process a Catholic, are you proud of the Catholics, 70 or 80% of people?
No. I have no problem with saying that they're Protestant or Catholic. Okay.
Once you get involved with these armed groups, that becomes heightened to have all these sort of small group pressures,
the pressure on you to sort of heighten your identity, your sense of self, your sense of belonging with those communities.
You come in isolated. You're only working within the discourses and the narratives of those organisations.
So your worldview narrows as you become very, very identified with your group.
And that is very key. Very committed. So committed initially to the militaristic activity involved in violence.
And then later that commitment troubles three without radicalised identity in terms of your more positive community kind of work.
And this guy is trying to explain that in a way. So, you know, me personally,
it seems to be that what I was doing then and what I continue to do is see somebody
formerly been involved in the military side of things and I've been involved in politics.
And I guess the strategic thinking is to stand up for the loyalist people,
what we perceive to be our right, not to be downtrodden by republics, by anybody.
You know, nothing has changed with me. I don't see that as the same things that are there since the same motivators.
This drive and the motivators that drove a lot of the violence are the same motivators drive and the more peace work.
And again, this is the kind of to the thing that most people talked about,
why they were doing this activity and why that moved away from violence was this idea of a kind of a belief and the shared future,
this idea that Northern Ireland, you it's it's a it's a no win situation in terms of conflict.
The populations are too evenly matched. No one's ever going to win that war.
You know, you got, what, 55% Protestant, 45% Catholics, too, even, you know,
if they've been 10% Catholic, a 10% Protestants, they could have been wiped out.
But it didn't happen like that. So the conflict can't military you can't win it in a military sense.
So we have to look forward, look for something else. We went back to assess.
And so a lot of people reflected back against Ulster-scots and Irish unionism and politics and tradition and,
you know, to the Irish, United Irishmen and all these different things.
So as I said, so we went back to the Covenant, looked at some of the issues that were in the Ulster Covenant, like civil or religious freedom.
And if we really believed if unionists really believe in civil and religious liberty, that must be for all of us, for Protestants,
for Catholics, for nationalists, Welsh Unionists of Today, for the ethnic minorities, as well as indigenous people.
So this idea that, you know,
we have to move towards this democratic sure future to get the best solution for all of Ireland rather than any particular ethnic group.
And as I said, this is one of the big push for people.
Is this future generations, the idea of not having to have their children or grandchildren do the same things in their did and the and the conflict?
You know, as he said, I don't want any more conflict. All our people that are lining up the jail, that are lying six foot under.
I don't want another young boy from this state because some middle class politician who stirs up the [INAUDIBLE], the shooting,
some of the young parts because there are different there are different religion
spending the best years of his life in jail or getting shot dead himself.
I don't want that for any of the kids in assisted. I want jobs.
They want nice housing. I want a good environment. That's all we want. It's not too much to ask.
That's you want a life. And this idea get into this normal getting back to normal life, trying to find about a future for for everybody.
So these are the kind of things that drove drove people.
We're also going to quickly just look at a couple of barriers that held people back are held as processes.
I said you're looking at a process that's been going on for a long time.
Okay. So if you think the group was going to stand died in 2007, still are to die 2017.
So these processes take a long time. Some of the reasons for that is as a population to feel stigmatised.
As I said, there's a lot of issues within the population around things like mental health problems with economic, you know, trying to get a job.
I think I sit for like 70, 78, 80% of the of the prisoner population site have a financial problems.
50 or 60% of them have problems getting a job.
They feel like second class citizens within the communities because that can access the
same rights as individuals because of the criminal record and all this kind of stuff.
So particularly within the liberal arts community, because people loyalist community had a choice, you know, you could join the police,
you could join the R, the UDR, you could do something legal to try to combat Republicanism if that's what you wanted to do.
Or you could do the illegal activity and join the paramilitary. So within unionism, there's a big stigma about the fact that the.
These people are bad. These people took an illegal route to try to do that activity that could have taken a legal route, the activity.
Okay. So there's that kind of stigma within that within this community.
And then there's a wider stigma, particularly see within the media.
But even when these people do something positive, there's always the idea of the buyers who care.
Cause in the past have done this in the past to kill someone in the past, you know, the bomb, somebody in the past is this.
And they can't move forward from that.
And that holds them back, particularly when they're in competition in the modern world, trying to get funding for projects and move forward.
Conflict transformation activity. The competing against, I guess, people here more professional, you know,
civil society organisations that are more respectable are more likely to get money and things that got sort of kind of held back and that way.
And again, as the last person is told, with their every occupation form says, have you ever convicted of a criminal offence?
I right no one that for obvious reasons I've told the truth.
Rasp here possession of a bomb with intent to endanger life, instructing others in the use of firearms and bombs.
I mean, what does that say? So again, what tends to happen is they get a job because they lie on the application form.
But Northern is a very small place, so someone knows who you are.
That's how the employer, then you get the SA. Okay, so you can't hold down the job.
Still working for a and the grey economy. Cash and hard kind of work.
Lupine labour, you know this kind of thing. Difficult to kind of sustain a family livelihood, which makes things difficult.
Why does it take so long? It's a difficult process for the organisations to move through to try to keep organisations kind of cohesive.
You know, if you think of the skill set that a lot of these paramilitaries have perfect jobs,
that organised crime or criminality or other activity set up a splinter group, another armed group, move off and do activity like that.
So you're trying to move forward, but it appears that keeps everybody coherent involved.
Okay. So, you know, as I said, you know, with benefit of hindsight, we should have considered what are we going to do with redundant gun men?
These men have suffered to the point of death, asking after receiving nothing.
Many older men have no nothing but violence, and the psychological damage has left many ill equipped to cope with what
passes for normality and the chaos that if you look at things like GHQ scores,
40%, 40% of the population are have scores indicative of mental health problems.
If you look at things like prescription rates for anti-depressants or anti-anxiety drugs,
that about 40% have been prescribed those drugs in the last 12 months, PTSD, think 50 at 60% should symptomology of PTSD.
So there's a lot of psychological damage because what they've done to themselves,
you know, because through their own perpetration of violence have harmed themselves.
But, you know, if you've killed somebody, you can't go to your GP and say, oh, well, murdered this guy and I feel really bad about it.
So it's difficult to try to get psychological assistance or psychological help.
So this is these sort of problems.
Plus, people have in prison for a long time to come out and have all those problems that prisoners have a readjustment as well.
So the failure to give these men a role, which maybe argued their sacrifice deserved, has meant for some have created their own selves.
What role is a for an experienced paramilitary finds themselves surplus to requirements?
The answer is surely obvious. So try to keep the organisation together as men.
It's been a slow process to try to move forward because you're trying to stop a fractured split and people doing their own thing.
Still a big problem in Loyalism. I mean, you mentioned the leadership was important,
but the fact is it isn't really that many leaders and leaders of any ability within their organisations are few and far between.
Particularly you think, since David Irvine, obviously Joe McMichael and things are dead, there isn't really people there to take that.
We will only lead them in that kind of way. So that's sort of held them back as well,
not having enough people to go around the sort of bring them forward and bring them through and give them advice and strategic assistance.
So as far as this person, as far as I'm concerned, to be a political party, you have to be educated after the system.
You have to work the system. We have never had that over the years.
And obviously, being in 30 years of conflict, people missed the opportunity every time.
It's someone like Joe McMichael, who was a political genius, was trying to put forward political,
whereas the IRA wiped them out because they knew quite rightly. Have you got similar party to what they were running?
We were probably unstoppable. Okay, so that lack of leadership is also limiting factor.
What are they problems? Is the legacy of the conflict to different levels is the level that this person is talking about.
In a way, you've had a conflict of 30, 40 years. You've demonised the enemy to that level.
The propaganda that you've run within your own community to demonise them has been so strong, it's hard to give that up.
You have a society that really believes conflict can solve problems.
So you have a very, you know, traumatised society that still believes to a degree the violence is way forward.
I mean, look, I hope people vote either for you or your vote. Sinn Fein is still very divided at this point and.
That hasn't changed. So you have this sort of macro level that makes it difficult to leave the violence behind that legacy issue.
You also have the issue in terms of the day to day activity for what housed the paramilitaries.
And you have someone someone's doing some sort of criminal activity.
So people don't go to the police because it's the police will come here. They want investigate the crimes they go to.
The paramilitaries say, well, will you support this person? They're doing X, Y and Z.
So again, you have these kind of subcultures of violence where people are coming within the community,
trying to get the paramilitaries to engage in violence and self and police within their own communities.
And these are problematic issues as well as make it difficult to reform because they're wider than the organisation.
They're really embedded within the community. Okay.
Okay. So let's finish off then. Give us time for some discussion.
As you can see, I think the the talk that the the level of factors involved are, you know, right across the whole spectrum.
I've got this sort of sound issue, prop issues that could help and hinder.
You've got the organisation problems, family, individual level factors, again, which can help and hinder people's engagement.
Things that got people involved in the violence or move people,
radicalised people or mobilise people in terms of violence can also play a role
in their own removal from the violence and their own disengagement as well.
So similar factors like family and all that kind of stuff can play on important aspect.
Again, I would say this is for my participants, but I kind of have an asset base to think through for me.
For example, the prisoners, people who go to prison, having that time to sort of have these conversations,
discussions, education, all that kind of stuff that came with it is important.
But obviously prisons are a complex environment and even within Northern Ireland,
the impact imprisonment has on the prisoner depends when they're present,
whether they're in long cash, whether it's blocks or whether the blanket protests are happening or the hunger strikes.
All these things have to be take into consideration.
It's not just a straightforward prison is good, you know, for bringing about de-radicalisation or disengagement.
As I said, I think you can see here that disengagement does not mean deradicalisation.
So the people and this here, NIJ and the post-conflict space engagements, community work,
culture transformation work are doing that because of the sort of radicalised,
mobilised identities, activist identities that the formed through the militarism and their engagement and their imprisonment.
So when we think about trying to bring it, you know, it's a very popular idea to have these programs at deradicalisation.
But in some ways perhaps these can be counterproductive because you're spending time trying to de-radicalize people when you don't need to.
You're probably alienating them. They're probably wasting time that could be used and trying to reintegrate those people back into society.
Okay. So, you know, for the population here,
you know how often their old comrades association where they can still get their sounds right down to the other,
can have little periods and get togethers that lose that sense for that is probably important, more so than trying to de-radicalize them.
As I said, you find within these narrative accounts how people come in and out of the movements.
You know, the leave for particular reasons, come back into them again, do a different role.
Go back. I come back in things that got this idea. It's very tiring.
There isn't a linear pathway for these people.
They come in in different ways, different steps, different forms for different reasons.
Success for reintegration of combat has come. But in this case, as we said,
if you're wasting time trying to de-radicalize people in reality rather than trying to get them reintegrated is pretty more important now,
particularly for everybody else.
If you can't feed yourself and can't feed your family and can't have a normal life and you know you're going to have difficulty with integration.
So probably economic barriers are more important than any kind of ideological aspect we can.
If you look at work done in Iraq and elsewhere and why people think it's an insurgency there,
it's not ideology, it's because you're getting paid to do it. So it's the same thing here.
Money is important. So educational programs, training, jobs, that kind of stuff.
I as I said, one of the big problems is this legacy of the troubles that still promotes this culture of violence.
Okay.
So an interesting thing of I'm trying to look at now is try to work with these combatants to try to look at, you know, those their radicalisation,
those are experience of conflict help and the counter narrative where so they're more likely to be listened to if they're talking to
adolescents about not getting engaged in violence because that can sort of show how horrific it was through experiences and stuff like that.
So it can it be, you know,
good agents in terms of CVA kind of counter countering violent extremism are probably when you look at this research, you have to think,
I mean I'm the expert on organisational change or occupational psychology,
but probably there's more to learn there than there is in terms of counterinsurgency.
An organisation understand how organisations work. Heidi Maccabi A transformation, organisational change.
I think those things are probably more important approaches to promote disengagement and move people forward.
Okay, so I'll leave it there.