Voluntary Disengagement from Terrorism: Why Doing Nothing is a Good Policy Option for Handling (Some) Returning Foreign Fighters

Abstract: The hundreds of young Westerners who have gone to fight with the group Islamic State in Syria/ Iraq have caused alarm among security practitioners and policy makers.

Data on Western fighters in past conflicts indicate that a little more than ten percent later turned to terrorism. The rest did not. The unprecedented and growing number of Western fighters in Syria/Iraq threatens to overwhelm the resources of the security agencies of smaller European countries. They can hardly afford to risk pushing returnees, who would otherwise have disengaged, back into the arms of extremist groups. But how to shape countermeasures so they do not work at cross-purposes with the natural disengagement processes, that appear to be at work?

This talk is based on a comprehensive review of case studies, which document voluntary disengagement from violent extremism in a Western context. It identifies broad patterns in terms of how and why individuals disengage, discusses the applicability of these insights to the returnees and discusses policy implications in terms of how to handle the homebound fighters. 

About the Speaker: Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen served as an executive director at the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) from 2008 to 2014. Her areas of responsibility comprised intelligence fusion and strategic terrorism threat analysis, preventive efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism, exit-interventions, and protective security efforts.

Previously, she worked as a research manager and Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). In this capacity she was embedded with Danish armed forces in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan in 2006.

Dalgaard-Nielsen is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She serves on the board of advisor of the Global Center on Cooperative Security, Washington DC and on the Board of Advisors of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the National Defence College in Sweden.

She holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University SAIS, an MA in political science from the University of Aarhus, and an executive MA of public management and governance from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Copenhagen. She has published widely on topics such as terrorism, radicalization, homeland security, peace-keeping operations, and transatlantic relations.