Cynthia Miller-Idriss - Hold Them Down: The Gendered Roots of Violent Extremism
Description: In this lecture, Professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss demonstrates how ordinary and everyday forms of sexist, misogynist, and anti-LGBTQ+ harm normalize and help mainstream extremist, xenophobic, and nationalist violence, in part by introducing or strengthening exclusionary ideas about national purity, degradation, and degeneracy that are racist and dehumanizing. Miller-Idriss first reviews five ways that gender shapes radicalization and mobilization to extremist violence-- containment, punishment, exploitation, erasure, and enabling. The main part of the lecture then focuses on the first tactic, containment, showing how ordinary and everyday forms of sexism and misogyny open pathways to more virulent ideologies and fertile ground for violent ideas and mobilization to take root and thrive. The lecture draws on three brief case studies: online gaming, memes and short form video, and self-help forums and influencers. Ultimately, Miller-Idriss argues, it is impossible to understand the rise of the modern far right or nationalist violence more broadly without recognizing how it is fundamentally gendered.
Bio: Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a Professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education at the American University in Washington, DC, where she is also the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). She is a Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Entrepreneur and recently served as the inaugural creative lead for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s residency program on social cohesion in Berlin, Germany. Dr. Miller-Idriss regularly testifies before the U.S. Congress and briefs policy, security, education and intelligence agencies in the U.S., the United Nations, and other countries on trends in domestic violent extremism and strategies for prevention and disengagement. She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of six books, including her most recent book, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2022). She is currently finishing a new book on the gendered dimensions of violent extremism. Dr. Miller-Idriss writes frequently for mainstream audiences, as an opinion columnist for MSNBC and in other recent by-lines in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, Politico, USA Today, The Boston Globe, and more.
CEU is offering this lecture in cooperation with European Forum Alpbach.
