One Week After the Hammoud Attack: What Have We Learned?
The first days following major incidents are often filled with questions and intense emotions. Grief and anger take hold, expressions of solidarity spread, and public attention turns to investigations and the search for answers. Gradually, everyday life begins to regain its usual rhythm, and the incident recedes from the center of public attention. Yet what remains afterward can be just as significant as the event itself. Some incidents leave behind questions that investigations alone cannot answer, because they concern the society in which they occurred, the relationship between its members and institutions, and its capacity to protect itself against the forces of fragmentation and polarization.
One week after the attack in Karak, the most important question concerns neither how we reconstruct what happened nor how we reiterate our condemnation. The moral position toward violence against innocent people is clear, while establishing the facts and determining responsibility remain matters for investigation and the judiciary. The question worth asking now is what this incident reveals about our social and political realities. Do we possess the institutional trust and social cohesion necessary to confront threats, both when they emerge and before they find their way into our communities?
National cohesion cannot be understood simply as an emotional response to crises or a temporary consensus imposed by a moment of danger. Societies are inherently diverse, encompassing different beliefs, interests, and political and social orientations. Their members may hold sharply conflicting views on numerous issues. What distinguishes a resilient society from one vulnerable to division, however, is the way it manages these differences and the extent to which its members trust that disagreement will never become a threat to their existence or rights.
This understanding resonates with political scientist Karl Deutsch’s concept of a “security community,” in which stability rests on firmly established mutual expectations that disputes will be resolved through peaceful means and that violence is an unacceptable means of settling differences. Applied to social relations, this perspective suggests that coexistence and cohesion depend on making the security of others an integral part of one’s own sense of security, with citizenship providing a framework that protects differences rather than turning them into sources of hostility.
From this perspective, the Hammoud attack raises a question extending beyond the violence itself to the potential consequences such incidents may have for citizens’ sense of mutual security. Karak, with its distinctive social history and the deeply intertwined everyday relationships among its residents, faces a test of whether these bonds can preserve trust when one segment of the community is subjected to violence. The deeper danger lies in the possibility that an individual act could generate collective fear or encourage perceptions that turn religious differences into grounds for suspicion, even though such differences have long been a natural part of shared community life.
In Jordan, this issue is inseparable from the transformations that have affected society and the wider region over recent years. Communities have become increasingly exposed to the influence of regional conflicts, ideological and religious mobilization, and the polarization generated by digital platforms. Geographic borders offer diminishing protection against the consequences of wars, violations, and scenes of violence. Their effects travel through images, narratives, and competing interpretations, reshaping the attitudes and emotions of segments of public opinion, particularly when they encounter domestic environments already marked by frustration, declining trust, or limited opportunities for expression and participation.
Attributing everything that happens to regional developments, however, offers an oversimplified explanation. External crises operate within domestic conditions, and their transformation into internal threats depends on interactions with economic, social, and political factors that may increase some individuals’ susceptibility to extremist narratives. Economic hardship, unemployment, a perceived lack of opportunities, and declining confidence in the effectiveness of political participation all deserve serious attention. These conditions do not inevitably produce extremism, but they may weaken individuals’ sense of agency and make them more receptive to those who offer rigid answers to complex realities.
It is essential here to distinguish between explaining the circumstances that extremist groups may exploit and justifying their actions. Poverty does not necessarily produce extremism, unemployment does not inevitably lead to violence, and anger over political decisions or positions can never justify attacks against innocent people. Yet overlooking these factors would also undermine prevention efforts. What is needed is a multilevel analysis that examines how regional transformations intersect with local conditions and how hate speech can exploit feelings of injustice, exclusion, or frustration, while avoiding preconceived judgments about particular individuals, groups, or communities.
The consequences of weakened political participation and declining trust in the public sphere also deserve attention. In a society where people lack effective channels through which to express their demands and participate in shaping decisions that affect their lives, the distance between citizens and institutions may widen. Political participation alone cannot prevent extremism, but it provides peaceful avenues for expressing disagreement and demanding change. It also allows individuals to see themselves as active participants in shaping their society’s future rather than passive recipients of decisions made on their behalf. Strengthening political and civic life is therefore an integral component of the broader environment that supports societal security and stability.
This brings us to the role of institutions, which provide a crucial link between the state and society. Trust cannot be established simply by asking citizens to demonstrate it, nor can it emerge solely from speeches calling for unity and cohesion. It accumulates through everyday experiences with institutions: the fairness of rules, the consistent application of the law, equal opportunities, clearly defined responsibilities, and the ability of individuals to access their rights without discrimination. As economist Douglass North demonstrated in his work on institutions and institutional change, formal and informal rules shape individual incentives and patterns of interaction, influencing the degree of certainty and trust within society.
From this perspective, discussions of societal resilience must extend beyond appeals for solidarity to examine whether institutions can create the conditions that sustain it. Equal citizenship requires fairness, coexistence becomes fragile when some citizens perceive their rights or opportunities as inferior to those of others, and trust struggles to develop when a widening gap separates formal rules from people’s lived experiences. The strength of society is therefore a responsibility shared by individuals and the institutions that regulate their relationships, protect their rights, and ensure fairness in the public sphere.
This is also why reducing the response to extremism to security measures alone is insufficient, even though capable security and judicial institutions remain essential to protecting citizens and prosecuting those responsible for criminal acts. Security institutions respond to threats as they emerge, while prevention requires a broader effort that begins much earlier. Such an approach involves education that cultivates critical thinking, media capable of confronting misinformation and incitement, religious and cultural discourse grounded in respect for human dignity and diversity, political and civic institutions that enable participation, and economic and social policies that address vulnerabilities and marginalization.
Yet the difficulty with many prevention programs lies as much in how they are designed and evaluated as in the availability of initiatives themselves. We have become accustomed to announcing workshops, seminars, and awareness campaigns, measuring success through the number of activities conducted, participants reached, and materials published. Meanwhile, the more important question often remains unanswered: what has actually changed? Have participants gained greater knowledge? Has trust increased? Are they better equipped to navigate differences and confront hate speech? Have these improvements translated into changes in their behavior, relationships, and participation within their communities?
If we take the Hammoud attack as a starting point for reviewing such programs in Karak, the practical question becomes whether local, educational, religious, and civic institutions possess the capacity to identify early signs of intolerance, create spaces for dialogue, and address concerns before they develop into hostile attitudes. The incident provides a compelling reason to assess what has actually been achieved on the ground and to determine whether existing programs have genuinely strengthened trust and acceptance of differences, or whether their impact has remained confined to the activities conducted.
In this context, the work of Charles Sabel on experimentalist governance offers a useful framework. This approach emphasizes continuous learning through implementation, cooperation among institutions and local actors, and the revision of policies in response to observed results. Policies aimed at preventing extremism should be sensitive to local circumstances rather than relying on standardized formulas applied uniformly across different communities. Cities, towns, and social groups have distinct needs. Effective programs should therefore emerge from an understanding of local contexts, involve communities in their design, undergo evaluations that measure their actual impact, and remain open to modification and improvement when they fail to achieve their objectives.
This requires shifting the focus from activities to outcomes and recognizing young people as partners in developing solutions rather than merely as recipients of awareness messages and warnings. Young people facing economic, social, and political challenges need more than appeals to reject extremism. They also need fair opportunities, spaces for initiative, channels for participation, and confidence that their voices can make a difference. Society likewise needs educational, cultural, and media institutions that move beyond presenting idealized messages about tolerance and create genuine opportunities to practice disagreement, debate, and free and responsible thinking.
Another essential dimension of confronting extremism is protecting the public sphere against generalization and stigmatization. Attacks targeting society should never become occasions for disparaging its constituent communities or questioning the loyalty of entire groups. Responsibility rests with individuals, while the facts are established through investigation and the law. Extending accusations from perpetrators to broader religious or social identities compounds the harm and reinforces precisely the logic of division that society seeks to overcome. At the same time, protecting pluralism requires a clear stance against incitement and against attempts to invoke legitimate differences as justification for violence.
The Karak attack, with all the suffering and questions it has brought, has demonstrated the importance of understanding security and stability as shared responsibilities extending beyond the immediate response to violence. Affirmations of national cohesion during a crisis must be accompanied by sustained attention to trust, justice, participation, and prevention. Societal resilience grows when communities develop conditions that reduce opportunities to exploit differences, expand the possibilities for belonging and participation, and strengthen institutions’ capacity to respond to people’s needs and protect their rights.
One week later, perhaps the time has come to shift our attention from what happened to what needs to change. How should we review programs designed to prevent extremism? How can education, media, youth policies, and social protection be integrated into a coherent strategy? How can we ensure that equal citizenship becomes an everyday institutional practice rather than a principle invoked on ceremonial occasions? And how can trust and cohesion be transformed from temporary responses to crises into enduring features of the relationship between state and society?
These questions cannot be answered through a single statement or a short-lived initiative, nor should they disappear once media attention moves elsewhere. They require sustained institutional commitment, policy review, and a willingness to acknowledge and address shortcomings, while avoiding both excessive reassurance and exaggerated assessments of the risks.
Karak is greater than the incident that occurred within it, just as Jordan is greater than the series of crises it confronts. The strength of societies is revealed through their capacity to recover from shocks, learn from them, turn suffering into critical reflection, translate reflection into policies, and ensure that those policies produce tangible improvements in people’s everyday lives.
One week after the Hammoud attack, perhaps the most important lesson is that the solidarity displayed in moments of collective grief requires protection during ordinary times. Societies can unite in the face of danger, but their more demanding test begins when the initial shock subsides and people return to their everyday lives and longstanding questions about justice, rights, trust, and participation. If Karak is to remain what its people have long known it to be—a place where the nation embraces all its citizens—then our responsibility begins with protecting the trust embedded in institutions and everyday relationships, and addressing the conditions that allow hatred to take root within society.