Radicalization in Belgium and the Netherlands

Critical Perspectives on Violence and Security

Nadia Fadil, Francesco Ragazzi, Martijn de Koning, Nadia Fadil, Francesco Ragazzi, Martijn de Koning

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788316194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Seguridad nacional

The concept of 'radicalization' is now used to account for all forms of violent and non-violent political Islam. Used widely within the security services and picked up by academia, the term was initially coined by the General Intelligence and Security Service of the Netherlands (AIVD) after the 9/11 and Pentagon attacks, an origin that is rarely recognised. This book comprises contributions from leading scholars in the field of critical security studies to trace the introduction, adoption and dissemination of 'radicalization' as a concept. It is the first book to offer a critical analysis and history of the term as an 'empty signifier', that is, a word that might not necessarily refer to something existing in the real world. The diverse contributions consider how the term has circulated since its emergence in the Netherlands and Belgium, its appearance in academia, its existence among the people categorized as 'radicals' and its impact on relationships of trust between public officials and their clients. Building on the traditions of critical security studies and critical studies on terrorism, the book reaffirms the importance of a reflective approach to counter-radicalization discourse and policies. It will be essential reading for scholars of security studies, political anthropology, the study of Islam in the west and European studies.

Part I

THE CIRCULATION OF A CONTESTED CONCEPT

Chapter 1

RADICALIZATION: THE ORIGINS AND LIMITS OF A CONTESTED CONCEPT¹

Rik Coolsaet

‘Radicalization’ has a twisted history. At every turn, it gained a new meaning without shedding the existing one. In the beginning, ‘radicalization’ meant Muslims espousing an anti-Western, fundamentalist stance, with Iran as the epicentre of a global Muslim insurgency. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it started to be loosely used as a synonym of ‘anger’. A number of Muslims were said to become increasingly angry as a result of a wide variety of ‘root causes’. But almost simultaneously, it became intertwined with ‘recruitment’ by foreign extremists, who tried to persuade these angry individuals to join foreign war zones. In 2004, another layer was added when ‘self-radicalization’ became the buzzword, since it appeared that one could also develop into a terrorist through kinship and friendship networks. That year, the EU officially embraced the concept. Myriad models and studies were financed to try to clarify the long, step-by-step process through which an individual radicalized into a terrorist. But, in a new twist, by 2015–2016 it became obvious that radicalization didn’t require a long process after all. ‘Flash’ or ‘instant radicalization’ was introduced to elucidate how some literally in a moment jumped into jihadi terrorism without any previous phase of, well, radicalization. In the meantime, by 2018, the culprit behind the global Muslim insurgency had crossed the Gulf. Saudi Arabia was now seen as the villain that, through its multi-billion-dollar promotion of a newly coined ‘Salafi-Wahhabism’, has perverted the minds of millions of Muslims worldwide into a rejectionist, anti-Western stance.

As this chapter will illustrate, throughout the years ‘radicalization’ has gained even more layers than those succinctly exposed in the introductory paragraph. When the scale of Europeans travelling to Syria was publicly disclosed in early 2013, many were taken by surprise, even in countries like the Netherlands or the United Kingdom, which had taken a substantial lead in the field of radicalization studies. By mid-2014, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst, AIVD) consequently reported that the existing tools focusing upon profiles and indicators had proven to be of only limited use.² This observation should come as no surprise. The very notion of ‘radicalization’ has always been an oversimplification of an extremely complex phenomenon, and a source of ambiguity and confusion as a result of competing paradigms and multi-layered definitions.

The concept of radicalization in relation to terrorism has no long-standing scientific pedigree. It was born as a political construct, first raised within European police and intelligence circles, boosted by the 9/11 attacks and finally embraced in May 2004 in an internal EU counterterrorism document. The attacks in Madrid, two months before, and in London in July 2005, pushed the concept to centre stage in EU counterterrorism thinking and policies. Unlike the perpetrators of 9/11, these attackers did not come from abroad but were individuals who grew up in Europe and were often born there. How did they come to resort to terrorism and turn against their own countrymen? Why were they attracted by extremist ideologies? What made them vulnerable to recruiters? Something, it was argued, must turn a person from a ‘normal’ individual into a terrorist. Untangling this process became the essence of radicalization studies and the holy grail of European (and later worldwide) counterterrorism efforts. Fifteen years after its official adoption and notwithstanding its widespread usage, radicalization remains a sloppy notion, ill-defined, complex and controversial. The same questions are still being asked today: What exactly do we understand by radicalization? What are its drivers? How do we reverse or stop it? Are radical ideas a conveyor belt to radical action? How does religion relate to it exactly?

2001–4: The origins of a novel concept

The 9/11 attacks made terrorism once more a leading threat to the West. Initially, this was essentially considered an external threat. The West was a target for al-Qaeda and other jihadi groups, as well as a ‘place for recruitment and logistical support for jihad in Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya’, according to Europol, the Europe-wide police office.³ Its international nature made it stand apart from the other forms of terrorism in the EU, dubbed ‘domestic’, such as separatist, extreme-left or eco-terrorism. The first official EU declaration on terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks clearly testified to the external nature of the threat. Under the aegis of the United Nations, the EU affirmed that it would act in solidarity with the United States and that it would take and support

actions … targeted and … directed against States abetting, supporting or harbouring terrorists.… It is by developing the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and by making the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) operational at the earliest opportunity that the Union will be most effective. The fight against the scourge of terrorism will be all the more effective if it is based on an in-depth political dialogue with those countries and regions of the world in which terrorism comes into being.⁴

But soon, counterterrorism experts in the Belgian police and in State Security (the civil intelligence service VSSE (Veiligheid van de Staat-Sûreté de l’État)) started noticing signs of ‘radicalization’ among youngsters in immigrant communities, particularly with Moroccan roots. ‘Radical’ was loosely used here. It covered the same observations described by Europol some time later as a ‘toughening’ (of Moroccan students in France).⁵ The Belgian assessments were shared with the colleagues of the AIVD, who, in the months following the September 2001 attacks, had noticed a parallel trend of recruitment of young Dutchmen by foreign ‘fundamental Muslims’ who had fought in Afghanistan. In a public report released in December 2002, the AIVD attempted to draw a profile of these youngsters. Many of them were young men of Moroccan origin (aged eighteen to thirty-one), who were born in the Netherlands or grew up there from early childhood:

These young people are often in search of their identity. They blame Dutch society for not having enough respect for their ethnic and religious community and not in the least for their parents and they themselves. Where other foreign youths opt for a more liberal confirmation of their Islamic belief and attach a lot of value to their social development in the Dutch society and others end up in a criminal environment, these youths find something to hold on to in very radical Islamic beliefs. Former Islamistic fighters who guide them in a recruitment process, give them a sense of self-respect, involvement, brotherhood and identity. They feel that they are involved in a fight between good and bad, which guides them into a certain direction and provides answers to existential questions they are dealing with. For some Muslim youths embracing a radical Islamic faith signifies a clear break with their former criminal existence, a way of life they want to leave behind for good.⁶

In this report ‘radicalization processes’ was incidentally mentioned. It was not altogether clear what exactly was meant, but from the earlier quote it can be assumed that it referred to Muslims ‘embracing a radical Islamic faith’. In relation to Islam, ‘radical’ had indeed become a widespread term since the Iranian revolution of 1979. It was in this sense that the AIVD’s precursor, the BVD, used it in the early 1990s when referring to the ‘increasing radicalization or fundamentalization of Muslim communities’.⁷ But here too, the concept was not further elaborated upon.⁸

In its 2001 Annual Report, the Dutch service went one step further. It now explicitly linked extreme religious ideas to terrorism:

Never before has it been so manifest that extreme religious convictions within part of the Muslim community also involve risks in the sphere of radicalization and terrorism, in addition to other security-related problems, such as a polarization between population groups or imported conflicts. … The BVD’s intensified attention for counterterrorism is partly focused on the identification of breeding grounds for radical ideas that might eventually lead to actual support to or participation in terrorist attacks by Dutch residents.⁹

The ‘breeding grounds for radical ideas’ seem to refer in the first place to the countries of origin of the immigrant communities in the Netherlands, in particular the Turkish, Kurdish and Afghan communities, but the ‘phenomena that frustrate the integration of Muslims into the Dutch society’ were also identified, albeit in lesser detail.

The Dutch intelligence service called for both dialogue and repression as measures to prevent radicalization processes from developing into terrorism. How exactly radical ideas transformed into violent acts was not...