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Defining Terrorism

by Victor Asal

August 7, 2018

This interview was orignially conducted and published in frank on April 28, 2018.

This interview with Victor Asal, a professor and chair of public administration at Rockafeller College University of Albany, was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place April 16, 2018.

My name is Victor Asal, I’m a professor of political science and Chair of Public Administartion at Rockafeller College at University of Albany, State University of New York.

I have three main areas of research. My first area of research is why people would go 400 miles out of their way to blow up people they’ve never met before. So criminal justice most times, most homicides are committed by people who know the other people. But going and killing people you’ve never met before, why would specific organizations do that? What are their strategies? That’s one area of research that I focus on.

My other area of research is why people are discriminated against by the State or by societies. Why are some people treated badly just because of the color of their skin, or their gender, or their sexual identity? I research all of those areas there.

I will note that I believe there is a strong connection between people being treated badly, and people blowing things up.

These two areas of research are definitely connected.

My third area of research is the area of pedagogy in political science. What are effective ways of teaching students about political concepts, about the theories of politics? Specifically in the areas that I research. I’m a big fan of games, excerices, simulations — making a student a lab rat in their own experiment is much more useful than discussing why did Stalin do this? If I have an excersise where you are Stalin, and you did it, everyone else in class can ask you to explain it, it can be a different understanding.

Related to political violence I spent a great deal of time focusing on collecting new data that allows us to get traction under analysis on the organizational level, within a couple different contexts. The area of violent non-state actors. Why do certain organizations turn to violence? And when they do, why are some organizations much more lethal than other organizations? One of the things that I’ve found in my research is strong support for an argument that Ted Gurr made 47 years ago, about why men rebel.

In that work Gurr is making the argument that discrimination and oppression are critical in why people turn to violence.

There were a lot of people who disputed this and argued about this — but there's been growing literature that’s been focusing at the ethnic group level, that this is true, that this is one of the drivers of the use of political violence. I’ve been looking at this at the organizational level using a dataset called Minorities Risk Organizational Behavior dataset. And that’s ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East and North Africa that claim to represent an ethnopolitical group, minority group. From the analysis, some of them are violent, some of them are not violent.

Can you tell me who some of them are?

Hammas, Amal, the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), lots of different organizations, again some are violent, some are not, and some go back and forth.

It’s very clear in our analysis that State oppression of the organization is a key factor in these organizations turning to violence.

That makes sense.

The other data set, that really is the genesis of myself and colleague, Karl Rethemeyer here at U Albany, is the Big Allied and Dangerous data set, which has the acronym BAAD. The BAAD Dataset is the dataset of organizations that have already turned to violence, that are using violence, and to be able to look at why some of them are so much more lethal than others, or use CBRN weapons [chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear ] in terrorism and such.

One of the interesting things that we’re finding is that organizations that are networked tend to be much more lethal than organizations that are not networked.

What do you mean by networked?

Having allies. For example, how many things have you gotten by knowing somebody?

Nearly everything.

Right, so we’re finding that that’s true of organizations also. Organizations that have connections tend to be more lethal, tend to get a lot more done, in a lot of different ways. Friends can be very, very helpful.

The other thing that we’re finding is that organizations that are lethal tend to generate more rivals. There’s a cycle process. But there's another issue here, that really drives these organizations, and that’s ideology. There’s some really interesting theoretical and case study work by a guy named Mark Juergensmeyer. He talks about how ideology can compel organizations and people to kill. Because they have this power of othering…have you ever seen the movie Aliens?

No.

You should see the movie Aliens. It's a great movie. Our heroine, Ripley, she’s trying to protect this young girl from aliens. And the aliens are these sentient, intelligent creatures, that have this unpleasant habit of eating humans. Ripley stumbles into a nursery of baby aliens. I mentioned that the aliens are intelligent beings?

Yes.

Well, Ripley also has a flamethrower when she stumbles into this nursery, and she flame throws all these babies, killing them all. And whenever I’ve watched this scene with other people, do you know what they do? They cheer! And this captures this sense of othering.

If I can build an ideology that makes me the good guy, and makes you evil, or not really even human — that enables me to say I can kill as many of you as I want, and I can kill as many civilians as I want. So ideology, particularly religious ideology, has an important impact. And the combination of religious and ethnonaturalist ideology have a very, very important impact on the behavior of these organizations.

The issue of killing civilians gets at one of the core debates we are having about terrorism. Because the term terrorism can be used in many ways. And there are lots of people who use the term terrorism to describe any violent organization they don’t like. Those are the terrorists, these are the good guys. And if you’re trying to study this phenomena from an analytical, theoretical perspective, in my mind that is highly problematic. Because what that means is the definition of what we’re looking at is whether we like you or not. And that might be a great definition for seventh grade friendships, but not a great definition for doing analysis.

And there are big debates about what, and how we should capture terrorism, even if we’re talking about it in an analytical fashion.

How would you like to define it [terrorism]?

So I define terrorism not by if I like you or don’t like you. I define terroism by, are you a political organization, with a political motivation, who is blowing people up, and specifically targeting civilians?

Intentionally targeting civilians.

Yes. Intentionally targeting civilians, to hurt and kill civilians. Now, there are organizations that are insurgent organizations that target soldiers, there are organizations, terrorist organizations, that intentionally target civilians, and there are lots of organizations that do both.

I will note that sometimes civilians get killed that are not being targeted, and in my mind, that is not the same thing as targeting civilians to kill civilians.

It's one thing to shoot somebody in uniform, I don’t have to like it, especially if I’m wearing a uniform, but I would consider that very different behavior than blowing up a nursery school.

How do you feel about US military action, especially in the Middle East, where they are not fighting people in uniform?

When I say uniform I am using it prosaically — I’m saying fighters.

Any figher? Even if they happen to be a civilian?

If they are in a militia, they’re fighters.

There is a huge difference between shooting at somebody who’s got a gun, and killing parents and children who are not involved in the conflict.

Let me very clear here, there's another distinction about terrorism, when people talk about terrorism, mostly what they’re talking about is non-state actors. There is a whole discussion about State terrorism. In my mind, if the State is intentionally targeting civilians, they are involved in State terrorism. But again, that's a controversial topic as well. Which gets back to my other focus, which is political discrimination and political oppression. When it comes to violence, I primarily look at non-state actors. Both insurgents and terrorist organizations, and what factors are pushing towards targeting civilians and other kinds of behavior. But States can be pretty awful. And if we want to compare which kind of organizations, between non-state actors and States, which have killed the most amount of civilians, there is no contest. Russia did a phenomical job under Stalin slaughtering millions of people. Hitler. I mean, we could go on and on about States. There have been States that have been lax, and have killed civilians by being lax, and not paying attention. And there have been States that have intentionally targeted civilians, who they meant to kill.

Do you think your research can help inform policy or military action in dealing with these organizations?

I would hope so. One of the key aspects of the kind of data I’m collecting is that it can help you identify who to be most worried about. You should know that most terrorist organizations don’t kill anybody because they are fairly incompetent. And very few kill many people.

The second component is, and I’m not the only person saying this, other researchers would strongly agree with me, is that treating people badly is a bad idea.

A really sad example of this is the invasion of Iraq. Where the U.S conquered Iraq and then fired the entire military, and put them out of jobs, and took them out of organizational structure, and that was a big mistake. Oppression in general is not a smart policy.

What are the fundamentals of understanding terrorism as you define it?

I think there’s normative components here, and empirical components. When it comes to thinking about terrorism,

I think it would be very helpful for the general public to realize that terrorism is a political strategy that is focusing on killing civilians to try to move forward a political effort.

Try to understand why these organizations are doing this, strategies to make them stop is important, and something we need to be paying attention to. And being able to draw a distinction between violent organizations, we may or may not not like their ideology, but they are not killing civilians. It's important to make the distinction between organizations that maybe you do like, that might be killing civilians. A concrete example is John Brown. His goal was to stop slavery. I am in favor of stopping slavery. John Brown slaughtered civilians. Intentionally. That makes him, in my mind, a terrorist, whether I like his ideology or not. Being able to make that distinction is important both analytically, but also normatively, for how we understand the world around us.

A Rose In Harlem

by frank

November 18, 2018

This interview with the students of The Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem was conducted and condensed by frank news.

From left to right: LaShay Fernandez, Morgan Carter, Javeria Amir, and Fargana Alden.

Morgan: Right now, we're learning about how to take an issue that we feel passionate about and see how we can impact our local government - legislative, the mayors, governors. To see how we can change the issue, or see if we can get more engagement so people will pay attention. The issue we all picked was sexual assault in schools, from colleges, middle schools, high schools...

Why did you choose that?

Morgan: At first, it was separated for a week. Some people wanted to do education and the other side wanted to do sexual assault. We were debating for a week or two and none of us wanted to do it together, and then eventually we just had to decide - why don't we just put them together? Now we're doing sexual assault in schools. And how education and money affects why we don't have sex ed.

That's amazing.

Javeria: There's this thing that there's enough about raising awareness for it. It's time for us to take action and the way we can take action is contacting our local office members rather than just going for the governor or the president. We're saying oh my god the President's doing this and what are we doing? We know we can't directly affect what the President is doing himself, but we can work at a local level which is what we're going to do now.

Who are your local officials?

Javeria: Our mayor and our city council members. We would start contacting them rather than the governor.

LaShay: We did a whole thing where we sat down with people in our neighborhood or district to look up all our local members and see what they're doing and see if they're good. We looked them up and really tried to see if our representatives are everyman or superman. To see how much of our representation is actually what we want, or actually accurately depicts the people that are there - us.

What's the conversation around sexual assault? What are the things you want to see done and what are the sort of modes of getting those things done?

Morgan: Today we learned about root causes and systemic causes. We're starting in elementary schools and high schools. People have sex ed, but we realized that a lot of the problem is that people don't actually know what counts as sexual assault. No one has consent classes. You can't just start at high school, because by that time a lot of people are already having sex. We said that maybe we could start with 7th and 8th graders and give them sexual education - maybe not assault, but basic knowledge so that later on they can know - this is what we do, this is how this works.

LaShay: It's very hard because since people are so young and it's such a fragile thing even though yeah, you should learn about it, we're also talking about different ways to tackle the situation. Instead of just saying "consent" and just straight talking about sex with 12 year olds, it's using different methods. There's this video that a college made about tea and offering people tea and it's really weird, but it really pushes the message of consent and not forcing people to do what they don't want to do.

It's also hard to figure out how we want to approach certain grades or approach people in general in ways that don't make their parents uncomfortable if their parents have an issue with talking about sexual assault and consent in classes.

Fargana: To add on, some parents don't have a lot of knowledge on sexual assault or how to to keep safe, or they feel uncomfortable talking about it. For us to teach kids at a young age about safe sex and just making sure everyone's using protection, what no means if someone is saying no to sexual intercourse. It's very important for us, and also since we are young teens, it'll be easier to talk to students because we're in the same generation in a way. We would just be considered like their older sister, we'll have that bond if they ever need something, we can help them out.

Are you learning about how to communicate with your representatives directly? How can you make sure your voice is heard outside of the classroom?

Javeria: We haven't gotten to that point yet. We're trying to figure out what part of the issues are we focusing on, what are the factors that are leading to such issues, and once we have those down, then we can go and be like this is what's wrong with our system, and this is what we have to fix. Once we get that correctly done, then we'll be approaching them, but we haven't learned how to do that yet.

Morgan: It's hard because sex ed is like - a lot of parents don't want their kids learning about that and it's not just girls, it's boys that have to learn about it, too. It's kind of hard knowing exactly what we want them to do because it's often a societal thing. It's hard for them to say, oh we want a rule against this. You have to make something specific.

Do you guys feel empowered by the class?

LaShay: Yes, I was just talking to a friend about it today because I think a lot of times we sit in our class, and especially going to TWYLS, we talk about this stuff, like since freshman year we've been talking about this stuff, and it's such a big issue and we always talk about it, but we never talk about what we're going to do about it. And I think sometimes when you're just in your little city, you think this is huge and this is happening in the government and I can't do anything about it.

I think one thing that I've definitely realized in the class is you can do something.

Even if you're starting small, it's a ripple effect. I think that's what the class has really done for me. I can do stuff, even if it's really small, it's important.

Javeria: People talk a lot and they don't do anything about it. We have a social justice club and I feel like that has empowered us in general and then having Generation Citizen - being able to take action now, instead of just talking about it. What should we do? I feel like it's a wonderful opportunity for us to have.

Fargana: In addition, compared to other schools, TYWLS really prepares you. We're really thankful to be offered Generation Citizen because in other schools, again, they would talk about it - or not even, the topic wouldn't even come up in their conversations - it would just be ignored rather than at least being talked about it and seeing different ways how we can help. For us to talk about it and see how we can fight as young teens, it really impacts us.

Can you tell us more about the social justice club?

Javeria: The social justice club is led by Jessica Taylor, our 10th grade global history teacher. In that club, anyone - I think it's mostly high schoolers - can come in the beginning of the year, we focus on an issue and advocate for the issue we think is affecting our community right now. We're in 10th grade and we raised some funds for the Syrian refugees, that was around $500 by doing food sales. It's just the little things we're doing. We're seeing what current issues are affecting the people around us. It's giving back and even though our school doesn't have that much, we're trying to take initiative.

Fargana: We donated a bunch of toiletries to a women's shelter as well. Every year we would do something - I think of it as a main project and then a mini project. So the mini things are some local things - like donate toiletries, donate money, and then our main project is what all of us are mainly focused on and how we can help.

That's amazing. Have you guys learned about civics anywhere other than Generation Citizen?

Morgan: I think some of us learn it at home, but in school, other than government or AP US History, not a lot. I think as a whole, they always push us to change something or if you feel something, talk about it, try to change it so not directly, but I think that we all get encouraged throughout our years of being here to try to change something.

We always give stuff even if we don't have it, we're always just trying - we're always taught say something, do something, don't just watch.

Javeria: Our government class is coming senior year, it's important, but other than that we're not used to having that - what policies are, how they're made. It's senior year and Generation Citizen. For me, even if we're in AP Government, you're getting that in senior year which is a little late, but.

We're teaching our kids too late and Generation Citizen is going to help us. It'll end that battle a little earlier.

How early do you think civics should start?

Javeria: I feel like middle school. They're going into that 9th grade year where they're like we're going to be like high school, and they're already empowered so you might as well give them another boost.

Fargana: Yeah, it would really impact a person if you're starting in middle school. It would be perfect to teach them about the government issues and who's your local representative, what does it mean? Then when you're in high school, as the years go by, you'll have more knowledge. Each grade, we can all come together and create a bond within us and be able to go out and do something. For seniors, since we're capable of doing it, we can continue it in college and teach others that really didn't have this opportunity when we were in high school.

Are any of you about to be 18?

Yes, yes.

Are you planning on voting?

Javeria: Yes! I was going to say that. Us turning 18 - I feel like this is encouraging me at least to vote. That's one of the ways my voice can be heard, so why not? I feel like that's part of the issue. We need to tell them - yeah, voting may seem like your voice is not heard at all, but we're the people and you're one person so we need all the people to make that voice be heard, so vote, please.

Are you excited to vote?

Javeria: Yes, I'm really excited. I've been waiting. I've been waiting to turn 18 so I can vote.

LaShay: I think it's so funny that she's acting like that because my parents don't vote and it's really weird. I'm always like why don't you vote? "Well it's not gonna matter." I'm really glad I took this class because you're influenced by your political socialization - you're influenced by the people that you're around, and you inherit these ideas and you're kind of conditioned to believe this one thing and I think before I came to TYWLS, I kind of did have that mindset of well, I can't make a change, I'm one person. I'm so excited to vote now and it's so weird because before I didn't think it would matter.

Fargana: I don't turn 18 until another year, my parents are immigrants - they're both US citizens - so it's for them, the only main election they worry about is presidential because that's the big one, but I feel like now that I have more knowledge on this, I'm literally waking my mom up early so she can come with me to go vote. Well, for her to vote, I'm just gonna be there making sure she's there.

Morgan: I'm the exact opposite. It's weird because my mom has always been - my mom is the kind of person, even if she doesn't like anybody on the ballot, she'll still vote. She's always told me to pay attention to what's going on and vote. And I was always just like, I don't really care, but I think Generation Citizen has made me really want to do something now because every single thing counts. I kind of wish, like a lot of things, that we would've learned it in middle school.

I think the problem is we underestimate young people. They think they're not old enough to understand it. When a lot of times, the middle schoolers know more than you think they do. Like a lot more. And I think that they need to start encouraging them and teaching them because I feel like 11th graders and 12th graders, we're about to leave, there's no point. I feel like if I would've heard it in 8th grade, maybe I would want to vote more. I can change a lot more things than I thought I could have.

Never underestimate the youth.

The Unlikely Combination of Comedy and Civics

by Caty Borum Chattoo

November 14, 2018

This interview with Caty Borum Chattoo, the Director of the Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI) and Executive in Residence at the American University School of Communication in Washington, D.C., was conducted and condensed by frank news.

I've worked professionally for a number of years to engage people in serious social issues that matter. Over the years, that work has ranged from a research-based strategic communication approach to efforts focused on narrative and creativity, particularly documentary storytelling and comedy. At this point in my career, my work is deeply focused on understanding the role of creativity and culture in social change – in public engagement and civic practice. Over the years, I’ve worked on topics including environmental justice, H.I.V., reproductive health, global poverty, global development, maternal health, and others.

What I started to notice over the years of doing this work is that, while of course these serious issues require a serious approach, we also need to embrace entertaining and emotional routes to encouraging people to engage with tough topics.

Sometimes I think we risk only talking to ourselves when we believe that things like fact sheets and policy briefs are the only ways that culture progresses to become a more equitable and just place.

With this in mind, my efforts most recently have focused explicitly on the role of creativity, mediated storytelling, documentary storytelling, and comedy. I'll talk about both of those separately. I place creativity and story and culture at the center of efforts for social change because I believe so strongly that if we don't let some light and optimism and entertainment and fun into these issues, we're just going to continue to only talk to people who are already believers, people who already care, people who are already doing things.

We're just not going to move forward if we don't find other ways to communicate about serious social challenges.

Do you think one can avoid screaming into the echo chamber? We are so in control of what we see it's inherently isolating. I do the scroll and see celebrities posting about civic engagement and I always pause and wonder who they're talking to.

I deeply appreciate that question. Part of my own journey about that question began when I looked at my own work. I was doing serious documentary work about some issues and serious strategic communication campaigns to get people to engage in issues like reproductive health and drug use. I sat back and said, "I am really worried that I am now only talking to people like myself," and “like myself” can mean a lot of different things about our own echo chambers. I could say similar educational background, similar perspective within a coastal city, similar socio-economic class, similar race, gender, age.

So, maybe I'm just talking to people who already agree with me. I wanted to dig much deeper. With that guiding question, I am interested in understanding more about how can we engage people who are not already thinking about these issues that matter or perhaps are thinking about these issues in ways that are damaging or harmful. How can we engage people differently?

When we look at documentaries about social issues, they are deep. This are not explanatory talking head documentaries, not true crime documentaries, but documentaries that deeply look at social issues. Generally speaking, those are character-driven narratives, which means they're really telling a human story about one person or several people as a way to illustrate how they're living their lives dealing with x-issue. So x-issue an environmental justice issue or racism or some other form of discrimination.

What we know about storytelling from a research perspective is that when we experience stories, we can be transported into them. We have an emotional experience with those stories, we identify and connect with characters. When we're deeply experiencing a human narrative that's told beautifully, and artfully, and creatively with music and editing and pacing, we have an opportunity to reach people in their emotional selves, which is incredibly important for persuasion and adoption of ideas.

Over the last decade and a half or so, there's been a big movement and an entire professional ecology that's built up around the idea of groups that drive civic practice and community engagement using documentary at the forefront of that work. My forthcoming documentary book is focused on this work and its influence. My book is telling the stories of the movies and the civic engagement groups that work with documentaries at the heart of them. For example, these groups and filmmakers seek out NGOs and organizations and community groups and business groups and leaders who are already thinking about or dealing with an issue in a way from all different vantage points, and this fabric strengthens their movement-building, if you will, with the use of storytelling.

Number two, the preaching beyond the choir question. Many times you reach people differently with this kind of storytelling. We can bypass some of these divides that we have. That's one thing. Storytelling lives as a really particular way that can help us transcend some of what we think of as tribal differences.

Comedy is this unique cultural place where we can meet and find laughter and commonality. There's so much research about comedy that shows what happens when we experience characters that aren't like us. For example, there is research that talks about gay and lesbian characters on television and people who have the least interaction with gay and lesbian characters in real life are the most moved by comedy portrayals that portray them as human.

Comedy is important for social justice engagement as well because when comedians talk about social issues in their work, through sketch, or scripted work, or through satire, or through standup, they invite us in to have a moment of lightness and optimism. There are so many social justice topics where we've communicated almost exclusively based on what I call dire, hopeless, impossible odds for success

When we do that repetitively, we definitely raise the alarm. We raise awareness with the public. But we might be encouraging public disengagement. We might be encouraging people to not be involved in civic practice because it seems so impossible to deal with these issues at all.

For this book I'm writing with my co-author, Lauren Feldman, we focus on comedy and social justice. A lot of what we're writing and thinking about is what happens when social justice groups, civic engagement groups, choose to work with comedy and why did they choose to do it. They do it to open up conversations to topics, to find areas of commonality, and to find areas for hope and optimism and a different kind of emotional response to issues. Comedy is a great cultural unifier and allows us to communicate about social issues that are pretty serious in a different way. But of course, comedy isn't for everything.

What do you view as the baseline responsibilities of the public?

In a really broad sense, the idea is of the public sphere is an underpinning to how democracy functions ideally. The idea is that we have these institutions of power and generally speaking, the most potent institutions of power are state power, or the government, and economic power, or the corporate/business sector. In the midst of that is the role of the people. The role of the people and the role of public discourse, our access to information, our ability to talk with one another, our ability in a public space to talk and deliberate and negotiate social challenges as both an activity we do with one another as citizens, and as people who are practicing civics. That's important. And the voices of the people in that regard are also a check on those very potent forms of institutional power.

If we understand that, then we think of ourselves as publics, not just consumers. We're not just people that are buying things. We're not just people that are passive recipients of information.

We're people as publics – we can be engaged in working with one another for the public good. For common good: getting a stop sign on your street for example. It’s one of the classic examples of this idea, but of course it becomes much more nuanced when we consider more complex social challenges.

So, I would say at a really, really basic level of civic understanding is truly the idea that we are publics with some real power to make collective change.

Our ability to have civil discourse with one another is really important. I would say that is a very basic minimum.

It sounds so obvious, but we're in a moment where we're not even doing that very well. We're not even communicating with one another about our shared values. I think that's incredibly important as a certain basic minimum is just simply the reminder that we're not passive, we're not helpless, but that we must communicate with one another in order to solve our common challenges.

What role does education have in explaining civics and civic responsibility?

I love that question. At the risk of sounding like a real old-school person here, I think it's key. I think it is absolutely fundamental. We must, must, have strong civic practice and civic rights being taught in school.

Even this idea of the public sphere, the role of publics, all of that is actually really meaningful. The digital media age is deeply controlled advertising and brands and we could travel down this slippery slope to imagine that we are simply consumers – that we're just here to buy things and to accept information from brands.

I think civic education has to be taught in schools in a really strong way. The importance and the history of voting and frankly the importance and history of protest. Our country was created from protest. I think that kind of pride and responsibility, communal responsibility in civic practice is needed. But also, the tactical details of how to engage in behaviors like voting also needs to be taught. Let me give you an example.

In 2004, I was working for the TV producer and philanthropist Norman Lear. Norman Lear is also known as the guy who founded People For the American Way and has been a great and vocal supporter of civil engagement, particularly civic engagement for young people, for years.

I was working for Norman at the time as part of a youth civic engagement organization that he founded in 2002 called Declare Yourself. As a backdrop, young people as a cohort are historically are the least likely to register and least likely to vote. Rather than assume that young people were not voting or were going to vote if they cared enough about the issue, we facilitated research that revealed we the most important reason they were not voting, at that time, was because they did not know how to actually register in the first place. In a well-meaning social change effort, if we had created a whole campaign that was focused on motivating young people about issues along, we would have failed. The objective was to register young people to vote.

What we learned, back to your question, was that they actually didn't understand the mechanics of voter registration. By the way, voter registration. Super complicated. Because it differs state by state, as you know. The deadlines differ, whether you can do paper or online differs. If you can do it at the DMV or some other place differs by state. They're turning 18 when they finish high school. They need to learn this in school when they're 16.

That's profoundly important and goes back to the role of education that needs to be involved... education that needs to help young people learn about the institutions of democracy and civic practice. They need to learn about the philosophy of why it matters and how democracy works. They need to learn the tactical realities of how to actually do these things: how to vote, how to be involved in public comment periods, and regulatory actions and so on.

Yes, I think education is incredibly important. I don't think it just starts in middle school and high school, I think we need to do it in college which many of us do.

Research also shows that when young people vote for the first time at 18, they're much more likely to be lifelong voters. Getting them early is really important.

I work with young people, and I love young people. I teach college students and graduate students, and I hear their perspectives all the time. They know so much more about so many things than we Gen-Xers did at their age. But we are not absolved of our responsibility as their educators. We still have to teach how civic practice works and how to do it.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

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