By NICCOLA MILNES

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Conflict is expensive, and it is on the rise.

In 2017, it was estimated that the global cost of conflict was $14 trillion. To put this into perspective, the global cost of primary school education in the same year was $3.5 trillion.

The world spends four times more on fighting, than teaching its children. It is fair to assume that this gap will widen, as the 2017 Global Peace Index found that the world has become significantly less peaceful.

An overall increase in extremism has led to both a rise in terrorism and far right political parties. White nationalism is on the rise. This may be — as studies have shown — because current generations are 40 per cent less empathetic than their counterparts 30 years ago.

To counter this rise, donors have increased their focus on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) and development organisations have followed suit.

However, this rise in CVE initiatives has come with its criticisms as there is much disagreement, in terms of what approaches actually work, and what factors lead an individual down the path towards extremism.

Building empathy

One frequent approach used in CVE is to focus on building empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s emotions by feeling them in oneself.

It is a commonly held belief by experts in CVE that if empathy could be stimulated, extremism could be pacified, and with it, the propensity for violent acts would diminish.

In short, more empathy could make the world a more peaceful place. There are many studies which have concluded that extremists in all forms of the political or religious spectrum lack empathy, and this conclusion has informed much of how CVE is approached.

But this analysis is only partly true. While it is true that people with high levels of empathy are generally more peaceful and less violent than those with low levels, other studies have found that many extremists are actually highly empathetic people.

Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian suicide bomber in 2002, was a volunteer paramedic during the second intifada. She assisted in food distributions, helped provide social support to prisoners’ families, and by all accounts, was a highly empathetic person. An important question to explore then, is how can individuals with high levels of empathy still commit acts of terror?

Striking the balance

Recent research has suggested that there is more than one kind of empathy, and they don’t all necessarily lead to peace building. If one extends empathy only to their own group (whether it be religious, ethnic, racial or political), it can actually make the individual more able to justify violent acts.

This is the theory posited by Emile Bruneau at the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. His research on multiple conflicts around the world has found that when approaches to CVE only succeeds in enhancing empathy for one’s own group, it exacerbates the conflict.

This is because the individual may, as a result, experience high levels of empathy towards the suffering of their own group, and thus hostility towards others.

Bruneau found that if an approach instead established a balance between the empathy felt for one’s own group, and the empathy felt towards outsiders, individuals would be significantly less likely to withhold help or condone harm against those outsiders.

Missing this balance is why so many approaches to CVE focused on empathy have failed, and often made things worse.

Getting this balance right is the foundation that is needed for true peacebuilding to take root. The crucial step is to identify approaches that can strike this balance in empathy.

Fiction is found all over the world, in every written language. It is built into school curriculums, and read by virtually every culture across the globe.

Reading fiction has been shown in dozens of empirical studies to enhance empathy in the reader, and that these effects hold over time.

What makes reading fiction on empathy particularly relevant to approaches in CVE, is that it has been shown to enhance empathy both for one’s own group, as well as outsiders.

When an individual is reading fiction, brain imaging has shown that not only are they strengthening their capacity to share another’s feelings or emotions, but their ability to understand the world from another person’s point of view, and to infer beliefs and intentions from this, is also strengthened.

These effects have been shown to appear immediately after reading in both children and adults, and to hold over time.

Niccola Milnes is a development consultant focusing on education and countering violent extremism. E-mail: [email protected]