Recruitment Vulnerability—with Dave Zuckerman, PhD

Why do so many young people, mostly young men, join violent groups around the world? Is it a bad gene? Are they just plain evil? Were there clues or signs that everyone missed? Are there predictive traits or behaviors? In this talk, Dr. Dave Zuckerman presents a model he has developed over the past fifteen years that indicates heightened vulnerability to terrorist recruitment. While the model does not guarantee that someone will (or won’t) become a terrorist, it uses both established and novel social science constructs to indicate an increased chance of susceptibility to recruitment into extremist groups. 

Dave Zuckerman is a Fulbright Scholar who holds the rank of Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Sacramento. He has studied and taught about terrorism to civilian and military audiences across the USA and Europe, and has worked with the law enforcement and security community for over twenty years. Dave has published studies of terrorism in Belfast and of Al-Qaeda’s English-language recruitment in the West. Dave is a former president of the International Jean Gebser Society, has spoken to the Monterey Friends of C.G. Jung, and presented at the joint conference of the Monterey Friends of C.G. Jung and the International Jean Gebser Society in 2019. Dave has been a visiting professor in Canada, Finland, China, and Taiwan, and is currently involved in a degree completion program for students incarcerated in California’s state prisons.

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