Thank you.
Chair and members of the committee, I want to thank you for this invitation to discuss Canada's national security framework and with it the 2016 “Our Security, Our Rights” green paper.
My brief remarks today focus on the importance of developing an evidence-based and “lessons learned” approach to national security. I'll be sharing my time with Ms. Carmen Cheung. Both of us are in the Munk School of Global Affairs in the University of Toronto, at the school's global justice lab. Each of us will be covering different aspects of the green paper. I will be discussing countering radicalization to violence. Ms. Cheung will be discussing accountability and secrecy. Our core message to you is the same: an evidence-based approach to national security should learn from local research, the experience of other countries, and evidence and experience in cognate fields, including crime and criminal justice.
The green paper identifies terrorism as criminal violence. It concerns itself with radicalization to violence. It has a theory of who might be at risk of becoming radicalized and with it a view of the process of violent radicalization. The green paper outlines the importance of working with communities, engaging youth and women, and promoting positive narratives as alternatives to violent, radical ones. It emphasizes fostering research on prevention and countering radicalization to violence.
I commend the Government of Canada on this approach. My own work has benefited from Kanishka project funding, and I'm pleased to serve on the executive committee of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society.
There are challenges to pursuing research in this field. Research approaches that one might pursue in other fields to build a policy-relevant knowledge base, such as experimental designs in criminology, are untenable here. Similarly, while any one case of terrorism is too many, the number of incidents does not always allow for the same sort of research we see elsewhere. Research access, methodology, and ethical review are more difficult in the context of radicalization to violence than in other areas. Yet there is a growing landscape of new research on radicalization and on terrorism, which, when combined with existing research on crime and criminal justice, provides us with an evidence base from which to work.
In the interest of time, I want to highlight just two sets of studies for the committee, since they relate directly to the green paper's theory of radicalization to violence, the importance of communities, and positive narratives.
The first is what we know about relationships between policing, community engagement, and embedded norms within communities. Research in the U.K. and the U.S. shows that when people judge law enforcement as fair and not singling out some groups, police are seen as more legitimate and residents are more likely to co-operate with the police and comply with legal rules. Social psychologists call this “procedural justice”, and this emphasis on neutrality, respect, and trust predicts the likelihood of co-operating with the police, both with respect to crime and with respect to terror.
In contrast, the political views of individuals who may be co-operating have limited impact. Research in Toronto suggests that the availability of counter-narratives to terrorism among youth is chilled. Existing counter-narratives are not shared widely in the community when there is a perception that the community is under targeted surveillance. Research in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities suggests something similar. Peers who notice early signs of extremism may be too fearful to alert law enforcement or others in the community.
On the flip side, research on gangs shows that having individuals with influence from the community—family members, faith leaders, ex-offenders, and other—provides moral messages that are valuable to the community, but the community disapproves at the same time of the behaviour. This seems to work in combination with positive opportunities for employment and engagement to reduce violent crime. If we take these puzzle pieces together, there is strong evidence that trust in state institutions can productively combine with a delegitimation of violence and of shared expectations of behaviour that encourage productive pathways for youth.
The green paper recognizes that different communities have different needs and priorities. As a result, one way of building resilience is to take an approach not exclusively or even primarily lodged in a law enforcement model, but instead, taking a broad view of community safety and well-being that integrates local concerns, including the needs of youth.
We are seeing work on countering violent extremism now move towards a complex public health model, where primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention, which I can speak about in Q and A, are engaged at the same time.
In the interest of time, I won't speak now about the need to broaden our understanding of radicalization to violence based on what we know about criminal offending more broadly. I am happy to discuss that in questions, but I want to say one last thing.
My point here has not been to provide detailed evidence about each issue. It is to echo the green paper's emphasis on the importance of fostering research, adding that we must pay attention to what we know already from related fields and from research on radicalization to violence specifically.
That brings me to a final point in my last few seconds. The green paper does not currently outline performance metrics of success in prevention. I recognize the challenges of doing so, especially with prevention distributed across agencies, and unfortunately, reducing the risk of violent extremism to zero is unattainable, but this makes discrete metrics that reflect prevention efforts and build resilience ever more salient. Incorporating appropriate metrics early on, matching the government's broader commitments to measurable outcomes would provide clarity for Canadians and for government on commitments to prevention and the building of resilience.
Thank you.