We haven’t been able to stop stealing, we haven’t been able to stop domestic abuse,
we haven’t been able to stop murder, how do you expect to stop terrorism?
Mass murder’s a crime. It’s always been a crime in Australian law. It’s a crime everywhere to kill people.
There have always been laws that make it an offence to kill people, to threaten them,
to have dangerous stuff, to conspire to do this. We just don’t need new laws.
What is terrorism is possibly one of the most significant questions in the social sciences.
Terrorism itself is one of the most controversial and contested of these, because it’s so politically loaded.
I would define terrorism as political violence against civilians, but Australian law defines terrorism as political violence.
That’s the difference between me and Australian law and that’s why I don’t like it.
It’s a really good question, how to define terrorism?
Famously we’ve always said one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.
The idea that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter I think is actually quite true.
And I say that not because I support any particular terrorist organisation
but it goes back to the causes of why people become terrorists in the first place.
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter is possibly one of the worst cliches out there.
Now it’s true that people view conflicts very, very differently,
but one of the things about terrorists is that terrorists are deliberately targeting civilians and non-combatants.
One of the main drivers of terrorism are people’s reactions to military conflicts.
Whether it be occupation, whether it be an invasion to a particular country etc. And this isn’t just with the Islamists.
If we look at some of the stories about the so-called major freedom fighters.
These were the people who were fighting against Nazi occupation, they were taking out Nazi soldiers
They weren’t planting bombs where they were going to take out women and children.
I think the future of Australian anti-terrorism law is bleak.
We’ve got too much of it, it’s poorly conceived. It’s at odds with constitutional values.
It has bad effects on part of the community. And there are other ways we can go about criminalising mass murder.
Terrorism is a crime. And if we look at terrorism as a crime,
we’ve had hundreds and thousands of years of trying to create disincentives for people to engage in crime.
One of our research participants in a conflict affected community in Indonesia
where also one of the major terrorist leaders Santoso was captured and killed in 2016.
These women told us, if you want to understand the security situation,
don’t ask the government, don’t ask the military, ask us.
So in the fight against terrorism, I think education is our most powerful weapon.
Men, or women might be involved in a terrorist network
and so their children will then go to that school that is funded by that terrorist network
and they will receive the curriculum that is mandated by that type of school and so that’s the education the child receive
and that’s the community that they’re around.
With a team of researchers in the Centre for Gender Peace and Security
we’ve been really interested in exploring the gendered nature of terrorist violence.
We’ve taken the view that only once you recognise that both men and women are capable
of conducting violence in the name of a terrorist or extremist cause,
can you also recognise the agency of women and men in preventing or countering that violence.
And in recent research in Indonesia, we were actually able to document a whole range of different
individual and collective activities that women are engaged in
in trying to counter and prevent extremist attitudes and extremist behaviour which they also see is leading ultimately to violence.
So what is going to be more effective in the future - education or military? Definitely education.
Many of these women, religious leaders, pointed to the fact that in the Koran,
Jihad can only be committed on the approval of the mother.
So that, if you were going to engage in terror, you actually have to seek out your mums permission.
So this provides a really important countering method within Islam which is kind of religiously justified.
And so therefore engaging in religious discourses
and supporting women’s religious leadership is a crucial way to prevent extremism.
When we look at radicals throughout history. The suffragettes were radicals, and thank god they did what they did.
So radicalism, radicalisation need not necessarily lead us down the path of destruction.
Even today academics can rarely agree on the definition of radicalisation, you know, what is it and how has it happened?
And that’s simple, because it’s an individual phenomenon it’s not a community phenomenon.
And therefore, if it’s an individual phenomenon the best people that are able to deal with it are those closest to the individual.
Now each individual reacts and behaves in different ways.
Is it a mental health issue, is it a drug issue, is it an isolation issue, alienation issue, discrimination issue, unemployment issue? A combination.
What is it, a rebel with a cause? A rebel without a cause?
People become involved in this type of politics because it’s transformative.
It takes them from someone who’s living a mundane existence
and they can kind of rewrite the narrative and cast themselves as the hero.
And this is what we’ve found in so many of the studies we’ve looked at in Australia and overseas.
These everyday people who decide to take a stand for X cause.
And in so doing they take it upon themselves the willingness to possibly engage in violence
or you know take a very strong stance against the state.
In terms of terrorism and feeling more hope with the future, I definitely feel
that it is through building relationships with others who might be different than yourselves, there is hope.
But it is when people silo themselves off and they operate in an echo chamber, then that worries me.
We have overcome many racial divisions in the country. We’ve created a great pluralist democracy.
I worry that terrorism is the pressure point that maybe could undo some of those achievements.
I think it’s important to understand that we as a nation are probably one of the leading examples
in the world today at managing diversity.
Simply because we do have a national agenda for a multi-cultural Australia. We have a solid foundation to be able to manage that diversity.
The fear of terrorism, and terrorism makes everybody a little bit more on edge, a bit little more divided, a little bit more siloed.
People tend to stay in their own networks, they don’t reach out a lot.
They’re not interested in inter-faith dialogue, they’re not interested in community building and so I think it brings people into tight circles.
Terrorism is having an effect on our local Australian Muslim community but not only in Australia, that is a worldwide phenomenon.
What I can see here in Australia though is that there is a very proactive engagement with the Australian Muslim community and the wider community
to dispel those myths and to dispel those fears through a whole range of interactions and the work that is happening and I think that’s a very positive sign.
We have a great deal of outreach from our centre and our basic motto is that
you can’t understand terrorism or ways in which to combat terrorism from behind the desk.
The really exciting thing about doing research in a social media age means that
we have a huge opportunity to not only influence opinion leaders and policy makers in Australia,
but we also can influence opinion makers and policy makers all around the world.
Sometimes that distance, that stepping back is important because that creates the space and the breathing room
to think about new things and to explore those ideas.
If you come to Monash as a student, my expectation as a teacher
or a supervisor or a mentor will be you’ll come here and be an independent thinker.
If you want to just come here and have someone tell you what to think by reading out of a book then you’ve come to the wrong place.