SOCIOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF THE TERRORISM AND ENGINEERING INTERRELATION

Abstract

In this article authors analyze the findings of the sociological research conducted by Gambetta D. and Hertog S., according to which the percentage of people with engineering degree who participate in extremist groups is turned out to be unusually high. In this case it begs the question: is this interrelation only intriguing correlation without a deep meaning or on the contrary there is a profound consistent pattern, which demands more careful study. In the current context, when extremism is a type of social conflict and it contains and amasses scramble and peace, as well their correlation, this kind of researches of interrelations between seemingly absolutely unfamiliar phenomena can have a strong informative potential. The authors of this research explain such a fact from the sociological point of view. Instead of a successful career young engineers are encountering limited employment perspectives under conditions of struggling economy in developing counties as a result of which relative social deprivation arouses. However the causes are hiding not only in social deprivation. According to conflictological paradigm extremist actions of people are a product of material and spiritual existent surroundings. Desire to leave difficult material surroundings give to individuals a perception of a right to revenging and hurt other people for their own position in life and urges them to commit a crime against other people. Admission of facts that surroundings subordinate individuals to them help to realize that not a person is antagonistic to the other person but all the living surroundings are antagonistic to people. Moreover, authors of the article emphasize that engineering educational programs attract certain types of mind, while engineers spend almost all their life with the eternal set of theoretical and cognitive principles which can be a hinge in adaptation to rapidly altering life surroundings, though there are plenty of engineers who are doubting such kind of claims and observations. Thus the possibility of joining extremist and terrorist groups increases with the level of education, wherein for the professions with high level of demand to professional knowledge this possibility is becoming even higher. This fact can be a major systematic confirmation that the heart of Islamic extremism consists of potential elites rather than poor. This kind of problem understanding lies very easily in the explanatory model of the conflictological approach, according to which the ruling class aspires to nullify people’s movement for justice, property which doesn’t belong to people by the means of extermination fear. Biological fear is a good answer to the permanent striving of poverty to transform in its opposition and this fear in fact became an effective instrument against it.