Youth in Violence: Exploring the Drivers and Actors

Bangladesh is a country whose foundation is rooted in religious harmony and embracing ethnicity and culture, a unique characteristic that sets it apart from other Muslim majority countries where practices of intolerance predominantly perpetuate. Unfortunately, Bangladesh has been on the receiving end of transnational extremism, which has seared into the fabric of its society.

In the last decade, Bangladesh has witnessed a steep increase in religious radicalization leading to terrorism. Violent extremism sprouting from Islamist radicalization, particularly that targeting the youth, has been a topic of major concern for Bangladesh.

From 1999 to 2005, the country experienced a period of extremist violence under the influence of Islamists groups which was put to rest by a government crackdown. However, despite showing strong and sustained economic growth in recent years, there has been a marked rise in incidents of extremism and violent extremism.

Violent extremism in Bangladesh forayed into moral policing in 2013, with the brutal murders of a number of secular bloggers, liberal academics and LGBT activists. A glaring exhibit of the depth of violent extremism conducted by the youth in Bangladesh was the Holey Artisan Bakery attack in July 2016, which showed how extremists’ influence had slowly but surely crept into our society, leaving us with a festering wound that is yet to heal.

Since then, random acts of violent extremism perpetrated by the youth has also seen an overall increase across the country. The Bangladesh Peace Observatory reveals that 19 incidents of violent extremism by the youth have taken place over the last decade, which might be a small number but is a significant increase from the baseline. Radical groups have targeted the youth to carry out their agendas. The internal vulnerabilities of the youth had since been largely exploited in violent extremism, leading to a paradigm shift.

It is estimated that youth between the ages of 15–18 years make up about an alarming 20 per cent of all suicide bombers and terrorist groups (BIPSS, 2017: 14). With targets now widened to include foreigners and attacks becoming more sophisticated, the violent extremism landscape of Bangladesh had now changed for good.

This has led to the need to study the nuances of the drivers and the local dynamics that have led to the radicalization of the youth, in the secular value-oriented Bengali society that long-cherished communal harmony. According to BPO’s study, lack of knowledge on religion and disengagement from family members have been identified as drivers of youths’ involvement in extremism. BPO had collected case studies on youth violence as one of its 26 categories. The youth have widely attributed their inclination to fall prey to drivers and actors of violent activism to frustration over unemployment, the spread of rumours in cyberspace, and lack of knowledge about culture.

Studying the tactics employed by the extremist groups for recruitment revealed a lot of interesting insights. Youths who have no prior police records are of particular interest to the extremist groups because they allow them more operational freedom by shifting the likelihood of arrest of the more senior leaders. Youths are also largely given more dangerous tasks under the pretext that they would receive lighter sentences due to their age if they are caught.

The process of radicalization is a multi-pronged process having undergone an evolutionary path, involving indoctrination, motivation and initiation. The extremist group have recently revamped their strategies. According to counter-terrorism officials, extremist recruiters have expanded their realm outside Dhaka, attempting to attract youth in regions that are politically charged and have a large conservative base, including the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Noakhali, Lakshmipur and Chapainababganj’ (ICG, 2018: 9–10).

The extremists have also expanded their horizon. Youth recruitment is no longer confined to poorer, less educated socioeconomic groups and traditional religious schools and has expanded to include rather educated, middle-class, urban youth as well.

The groups have also delved into education institutes especially universities and institutions of higher learning (BIPSS, 2017: 14). The 2018 ICG report denoted that jihadist networks ‘now tap not only madrasa students and their families in deprived rural areas but also privileged students in wealthier quarters of the capital’ (ICG, 2018: ii). The Holey Artisan Bakery attack showed that the appeal of extremist ideology has expanded to an unlikely cohort, raising serious concerns.

Three of the five alleged attackers belonged to Dhaka’s elite, not the more commonly associated with jihadist militancy madrasa segment. Extremists have managed to tap a new constituency for recruitment, even if only in small numbers with no major “success” since the 2016 tragedy so far.

In an unfortunate turn of events, Bangladesh’s demographic dividend is being used as a weapon against it by extremist groups. As of 2016, Bangladesh has a total of 46.7 million youth (aged between 10 to 24 years) from figures from the Population Reference Bureau, most of whom have little to nothing to do.

Bangladesh has a significant proportion of youth, many of whom have little to do. Figures from the Population Reference Bureau reveal that in 2016 Bangladesh had a total of 46.7 million youth (aged between 10 to 24 years) — approximately 30% of the total population (Rashid, 2017: 8). According to an ILO assessment (Hasan, 2017) around 40 percent of the country’s youth were not in education, employment or training. High unemployment levels were observed even among those with university education. A 2014 report revealed that nearly five out of every ten graduates in Bangladesh was unemployed (Hasan, 2017).

‘It is very possible that some of these young people become frustrated and harbour anger towards society, making them ripe for recruitment by militant outfits’ (Hasan, 2017). Khan (2017) also unearths that deprivation ‘satisfactory levels of education, health and well-being, employment, political participation and civic participation has led to their radicalization and extremism.

Social media and the internet have also had a key role to play in imbibing values of radicalization in Bangladeshi youth. ‘Police officers, lawyers and others who have interacted with jihadists contend that large numbers of militants are drawn to jihadist ideas online prior to joining violent groups’ (ICG, 2018: 22).

Bangladeshi terrorist groups are very active on the online space, especially Facebook and YouTube. Evidence from UNDP’s social media monitoring demonstrates that violent extremist narratives often overlap with other forms of violence, targeting female empowerment, minorities, and other vulnerable groups, reflecting a need for greater grassroots engagement on the broader issue of diversity in Bangladesh.

Apart from being a means of targeting youth, spreading propaganda through the internet is considered a safer means because it has a lower possibility of being tracked by law enforcement agencies (Rashid, 2017:27). Rampant urbanization and even speedier digitization taking place in Bangladesh, in part due to the government’s Digital Bangladesh policy, has created a space for extremist groups to flourish.

According to one estimate, the number of internet users in the country stood at 21.4 million in 2016, up from just 93,000 in 2000 (Hasan, 2017). According to Rashid (2017: 8), Bangladeshi youth pose particular vulnerability to online radicalization because they form a significant share of the total population, and many ‘are tech-savvy and addicted to social media’ ‘research conducted on the youths residing in Dhaka City reveals that almost half of them spend long hours on the social media sites and believe it to be an important part of their lives’.

The increasing number of young people connecting online is unlikely to have gone unchecked by extremist groups’ recruiters (Hasan, 2017). Bangladesh has 21 million active Facebook users (Rashid, 2017: 17). One study of 250 detained militants in Bangladesh, reiterated this notion, unearthing that almost 82 percent of them had been radicalized through various social media: only 22 percent of them had a madrasa background, the remainder being in general education (Rashid, 2017: 30).

Lack of knowledge about Islam, in particular about the use of violence, has made the youth vulnerable to radical ideologies and groups. ‘Ignorance of religious teaching as opposed to violence makes youth more vulnerable and susceptible to recruitment. Religious institutions have the potential to capture the mind of young people with the misconstrued interpretation of religion. These youths are manipulated into believing that they are actually struggling for a nobler and worthier cause, with the assurance of victory in this world and in the Hereafter’ (BIPSS, 2017: 14).

BPO is a research facility housed at the Centre for Genocide Studies, Dhaka University, which seeks to harness the power of open data to advance knowledge and understanding of peace and development in the country.