Thank you very much for inviting me today. It's really an honour to present to you. My name is Andrea Lane, and I'm the deputy director of the Centre for the Study of Security and Development at Dalhousie University, although today I am appearing in my capacity as an individual.
I would like to speak to you about research that I have conducted that seeks to contextualize the broader discussion of anti-terrorism legislation, radicalization, and counter-radicalization measures. This research was funded by a bursary from Public Safety Canada under the Kanishka research affiliate program.
My research examines so-called single-issue terrorism—that is, terroristic violence used in the pursuit of an issue, such as environmental protection or white suprematism or the outlawing of abortion. It blurs the lines between right-wing and left-wing extremism, and this kind of terrorism is very often understudied, with public attention and law enforcement attention directed more on Islamic terrorism.
In particular, my research examined why some activists choose to use terroristic violence as a protest tactic, and how those activists differ from their non-violent counterparts. More importantly, it asks how security agencies could tell the difference between violent and non-violent activists before the bang—that is, in order to prevent attacks.
My conclusions provide some suggestions as to how costly surveillance and law enforcement assets could be used more effectively. It's difficult to summarize a year and 120 pages of the research into 10 minutes, but I'm going to try, so bear with me.
My research was testing a sociological theory of mobilization—that is, of how people come to be involved with a particular social movement or group, in this case terrorist groups. The theory was that people only become mobilized into activism or terrorism when several conditions are just right for this to occur, and not, as is more commonly thought, when they start to have beliefs or ideas about an issue.
We tend to think about radicalization into violence as belief before action. The theory that I was testing actually posited instead that it's actions before beliefs, so that people's beliefs, radical or otherwise, actually come about only after their participation in an activist group.
People who are at a turning point in their life—and it doesn't have to be a negative crisis, and it could be something as simple as moving to another city for a job or obtaining a divorce—who come into contact with an activist group, almost on a lark or accidentally at a time in their life when they're more receptive to certain ideas or new people, can be mobilized. Both of those conditions have to be met. If they have contact with a group while they are not at a turning point in their life, they're not mobilized. If they are at a turning point but they don't have contact with a group, they are not mobilized.
I tested this theory using the 1980s Canadian terrorist group called Direct Action, also known as the Squamish Five. I compared them with members from non-violent groups whose issue areas overlap those of Direct Action, including anti-nuclear and anti-resource development groups. I conducted interviews and collected evidence from court proceedings, newspapers, and groups members' own writings to see whether the theory of mobilization held true and could explain the difference between violent and non-violent radicalization.
My research found three things that are important for members of this committee to know as they go forward with a review of Canada's national security framework.
The first finding is that activists are moulded by the groups to which they belong. A group like Greenpeace or the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform is not only a political group but also a social community with its own sets of traditions regarding the way its members should think about an issue and a corresponding set of traditions regarding protest behaviour.
For example, the CCBR believes abortion to be a social justice issue like slavery in the U.S., and it advocates for its supporters to use leaflets, bumper stickers, letters to their newspapers or MPs, and seminars to spread its message. Greenpeace, on the other hand, believes raising public awareness is key in effecting environmental change, and it encourages its members to participate in high-profile public stunts. This means that current members of non-violent protest groups are highly unlikely to commit terroristic violence because they are extensively socialized against it. In that case, violence is almost unthinkable for them because it violates the social rules of their group.
That brings me to my second point. Activist groups like Greenpeace, Earth First!, and Idle No More, who use what could be termed violence against property, are in fact valuable assets in the efforts to prevent violence against people. The conflation of violence against property and violence against people in terms of legislation or in crime prevention efforts does more harm than good, because in fact looking at non-violent groups that don't advocate violence against humans but that might advocate violence against property, for instance, is one of the best ways of finding out who within their larger groups might actually be at risk for being radicalized into violence against humans. If you alienate those groups by conflating property destruction and actual intentional violence against humans, then you lose a valuable asset. Those are my second and third points, because I recognize that I'm running out of time.
Thank you very much for your attention. I look forward to answering any questions you might have about my research or any other aspects of single-issue terrorism in Canada—which I gather isn't the sexy form of terrorism these days—and radicalization into violence more generally.
Thank you.