When a terrible attack occurs, especially when it involves terrorism, acts of hatred, or other forms of extremism, Amarnath Amarasingam is the expert who journalists will turn to while trying to help the public make sense of senseless acts. He has nearly 70 peer-reviewed publications, written and edited several books, and has shared his expertise on major Canadian, U.S., and British networks. His Rolodex includes some of the world’s worst outcasts, from ISIS fighters to Neo-Nazis – all to better understand extremist violence.
Where did you grow up?
I was born in 1982 and grew up in Sri Lanka for the first six years of my life. This is when the war in Sri Lanka between the government and the Tamil Tigers was ramping up. My earliest memories are of the war, hiding out in bunkers and things like that. Luckily, we had family already in Toronto and so we arrived as refugees and settled here in May 1988.
How did you first become interested in religion and extremism?
In my first week of undergrad at the University of Toronto Scarborough, 9/11 happened. That’s initially what sparked my interest in religious studies and sociology to try to understand violence. This idea of why people join violent movements and come to see violence as not only necessary, but obligatory, either as a defensive mechanism or for some kind of a broader cause, interested me.
What did you do with that interest?
I started my PhD in 2007 under Lorne Dawson at the University of Waterloo. I switched topics a bunch of times, but eventually came back around to Sri Lanka because, around that time in 2009, the war in Sri Lanka was coming to an end. It was that period where the Gardiner Expressway was blocked and there were a lot of mass protests in Toronto. So, that became my PhD topic: to understand diaspora activism and what happens when the main focus of that activism – the militant movement in Sri Lanka – is defeated.
Where has your research taken you?
Right after my PhD, I went back to Sri Lanka a few times because I was doing more field work and I started interviewing former members of the Tamil Tigers to understand the same question: how did they join the movement and what was life in the movement like?
Was the research dangerous?
The Sri Lankan government didn’t allow research from abroad during this period, so much of that work had to be undercover. You couldn’t meet people, especially former members of the Tamil Tigers, in the open at coffee shops. I had to work with trusted non-government organizations locally who would provide a safe space to do these interviews.
I was stopped by this guy on a motorcycle carrying a backpack three times one day asking for directions. He was making it known that I was being watched. But the bigger problem was some of the guys I was interviewing weren’t captured and were still on the run from the Sri Lankan government. I made sure, when I was taking notes or when recording, that I would immediately upload the interview content to the cloud and then erase it. I would flush written notes.
Where did life take you after defending your PhD?
Lorne Dawson was asked by the federal government to take a deeper dive into the foreign fighter issue. Around the time the Syrian revolution had started in 2011, people from Canada and other parts of the world had started leaving their countries to join ISIS or join al-Qaida–linked groups. The government was accustomed to thinking about how foreign events or foreign wars might radicalize people domestically to attack here, but they weren’t expecting a bunch of people to get on planes and leave.
We’ve always had a foreign fighter issue in Canada. We’ve had people go to Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, et cetera, but what was unique about 2013 and 2014 was social media. All these guys and girls who started to leave kept their social media profiles active. And so, they were tweeting about their breakfast and then they’re tweeting about what they were doing on the battlefield. It created a really interesting research opportunity to reach out to them and do virtual interviews either through text messages or Skyping with them.
What was it like to talk to jihadists?
It started to become all-consuming because when you meet someone for an interview, you talk to them for an hour and then you leave, but because you’re texting with someone, sometimes I would be talking to these guys for six months, a year, two years, over the whole time they were fighting in Syria.
I started to get to know some of these guys quite closely, fighters from the West, some Canadians. Sometimes they’d get killed, sometimes they would vanish. By this point, the returnee phenomenon had started and you had people coming back. I started travelling around talking to former fighters and returnees who were still committed but had left. I started interviewing a lot of mothers and fathers and siblings to try to understand the whole ecosystem around how radicalization might actually occur.
What do you do at Queen’s?
I teach several different religion classes, some of which touch on violence, hate, and xenophobia. Being in the classroom with students is great. The courses seem pretty popular, so I think I’m doing a good job. I’m also continuing with the extremism research. I am finishing a book on the far right in Canada with Stephanie Carvin. I am also finishing another book with Marc-André Argentino on dangerous conspiracies to understand why some conspiracy theorists become violent and others don’t. The far-right extremism space from about 2015 onwards has gotten very bizarre. There’s a lot left to examine and understand.
You’ve spent years researching this topic – what have you learned about radicalization?
If I think about the commonalities of the interviews with the Tamil Tigers, plus the Neo-Nazi interviews, plus the jihadist interviews, even the conspiratorial stuff, there’s this moral urgency that draws people toward violence. Once you start to believe that simple political activism is not enough, but a morally urgent thing to do to protect your group and to protect something more nebulous like culture or nation-state, then you’re in a realm where people can justify violence. I’m tinkering with this idea of moral urgency or what a friend of mine calls a moral emergency and how that might motivate and push people along.
