Militant Leadership

Description

This book profiles 12 militant leaders responsible for violence in Indian-administered Kashmir to identify effective deradicalization and counterterrorist interventions for global impact. Building off decades of research in cultural psychiatry, political psychology, social psychology, and South Asian Studies, multilingual cultural psychiatrist and psychological researcher Neil Krishan Aggarwal develops a method for analyzing militant leaders by examining their personality traits, motivations, skills and abilities, and significant life events to ask what propels them into violence. He presents person-centered psychological case studies based on primary sources in Arabic, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu to illustrate how leaders frame violence in their own words to recruit others.
By comparing and contrasting individual, group, and organizational factors of violence, this book proposes evidence-based deradicalization and counterterrorism interventions, bringing the study of political violence in Indian-administered Kashmir into conversation with research trends in Europe and North America. By developing a method for analyzing militant leadership through state-of-the-art scholarship, the book's insights can inform the development of case studies for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners across geographic regions and disciplines.

About the author:Neil Krishan Aggarwal is a cultural psychiatrist and social scientist who specializes in cross-cultural conflicts and negotiation. After medical school, he completed a residency in psychiatry, a graduate degree in South Asian Studies, and a post-doctoral fellowship in clinically applied medical anthropology. His areas of professional interest include cultural psychiatry, cultural psychology, and psychiatric anthropology. He conducts research and teaches in both the Department of Psychiatry and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University, where he is a core member of the Committee on Global Thought. He continues to maintain fieldwork in South Asia.

Table of contents

Introduction
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1.A Method to Construct Psychological Case Studies of Militant Leaders
Chapter 2: Burhan Wani, Zakir Musa, and Syed Salahuddin from the Hizbul Mujahideen
Chapter 3: Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, Ajmal Kasab, and Saifullah Khalid from the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba
Chapter 4: Maulana Masood Azhar, Afzal Guru, and Adil Ahmed Dar from the Jaish-e-Mohammad
Chapter 5: Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden, and Ayman Al Zawahiri from Al Qaeda
Appendix