Making Sense of Radicalization and Violent Extremism

Interviews and Conversations

Mitja Sardoč, Mitja Sardoč

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000579758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Terrorismo

This volume brings together interviews with leading scholars to discuss some of the most important issues associated with radicalization, violent extremism and terrorism.

The overall aim of these interviews is to move beyond the 'conventional wisdom' over radicalization and violent extremism best represented by many of its well-known slogans, metaphors, aphorisms alongside various other thought-terminating clichés. A vast range of topics are tackled in these conversations, including issues as diverse as the genealogy of radicalization and violent extremism, the rhetoric of emergency politics ('the language of fear'), the ethics of securitization, mutual radicalization, the challenges arising out of the relationship between cognitive and behavioural radicalization, Islamism bias in research on radicalization, the ethics of espionage (as an integral element of the 'war on terror'), the epistemic dimension of radicalization, the application of the just war conceptual framework to terrorism, and the ethics of exceptional means when addressing security-related issues, to name a few. The unifying assumption of the interviews in the volume is the complex nature of radicalization, violent extremism and conflicting diversity, as well as their interwoven relationship. While radicalization has become one of the 'great buzzwords' of the intelligence and security 'industry', pleas for its very abandonment as a useful analytical category have also started to emerge.

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, radicalisation, violent extremism, security studies and International Relations, in general.

1 Radicalization and Violent Extremism: Some Preliminary Considerations

Mitja Sardoč

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214274-1

Political violence has been one of the most important challenges facing modern societies. The brutality of terrorist attacks and their frequency together with some of the ‘collateral’ problems associated with radicalisation and violent extremism, e.g. Islamophobia, ‘moral panic’, right-wing populism [and terrorism] together with other forms of political extremism have brought to the forefront problems previously either compartmentalized in specialized courses on intelligence and security studies or at the very fringes of scholarly interest. Despite the consensus that radicalization and violent extremism represent a major threat to political, economic and social security of contemporary democratic societies, with terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 figuring as some sort of ‘Year One’ on the calendar of the ‘War on Terror’, the discussion over how to make sense about radicalization and violent extremism has been far from straightforward.

In fact, the process of radicalization and the adjacent issue of violent extremism open up a number of different issues, existing theories, policies and practices of counter-radicalization and deradicalization do not offer a unanimous answer to. A number of questions remain, to a large extent, unanswered, e.g. what criteria apply in order to distinguish non-violent from violent radicalization. What is the relationship between the cognitive and the behavioral dimension of radicalization? Is radicalization problematic only when it turns to violent extremism or is radicalization wrong in itself? Is the process of radicalization problematic irrespective of the method being used or is its negative valence associated exclusively with the use of indoctrination?

These and other questions are a clear sign that existing research and its focus on the etiology of radicalization [looking primarily for a causal explanation of the process of radicalization or the turn to violent extremism] leaves several definitional and conceptual issues either neglected or taken for granted. Radicalization, as Jonathan Githens-Mazer and Robert Lambert, have emphasized ‘is a research topic plagued by assumption and intuition, unhappily dominated by “conventional wisdom” rather than systematic scientific and empirically based research’ (2010: 889).

The voluminous literature on radicalization and violent extremism that began to pile up in disciplines as diverse as psychology (Moghaddam, 2005, 2018), political science (Gambetta and Hertog, 2016), criminology (Richards, 2017), intelligence and security studies (Neumann, 2003; Sageman, 2017; Sedgwick, 2010), sociology (Jensen and Larsen, 2019), cultural studies (Kundnani, 2012, 2015; Silva, 2018), anthropology, critical terrorism studies (Jackson, 2011), education (Gearon, 2015; Sardoč et al., 2021), social policy (Ragazzi, 2017), and health care (Heath-Kelly and Strausz, 2019) as well as philosophy (Cassam, 2018, 2021; Coady, 2021), is a testament both to the complexity of this phenomenon as well as the urgency by which this topic has been approached by both the academia and policymakers.

At the same time, radicalization and violent extremism are only one part of the puzzle associated with the polarization and fragmentation of contemporary societies as hate speech and fake news [as well as other dystopian narratives (e.g. sensationalism)] are an important factor contributing to social fragmentation and the phenomenon of conflicting diversity. Most importantly perhaps, these [and other] problems also challenge some of the foundational principles of contemporary democratic societies.

Interestingly enough, post-9/11 scholarship on radicalization and violent extremism has been marked by two important characteristics. On the one hand, radicalization and violent extremism became a legitimate object of analysis outside the exclusive domain of security and intelligence ‘industry’ in disciplines as diverse as political science, education, cultural studies, criminology, health care, psychology, sociology, anthropology, social policy and philosophy. At the same time, alongside the ‘standard’ concepts and ideas dominating ‘radicalization studies’, e.g. violence, terror, fear, security, conflict, extremism, this area of scholarly research gradually started to incorporate concepts previously thought to be outside its gravitational orbit including indoctrination, moral panic, polarization, social distance, conflicting diversity, populism, hate speech, etc.

Nevertheless, the progress being made has not been without its challenges, as ‘radicalization studies’ and research on terrorism in general remain plagued by a number of problems. Alongside some of the ‘standard’ problems associated with terrorism, e.g. ‘the problem of double standards’ [‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’], the phenomenon of radicalization and violent extremism raise a set of distinctive problems of their own. In particular, this area of scholarly research encounters a high degree of conceptual negligence. This has led to a major limitation in making sense of data and other evidence made available by empirical research. As Richard English observes, ‘[w]e face two kinds of terrorist problem. One is practical, the other analytical, and our difficulties in responding to the former have been significantly exacerbated by our failings in regard to the latter’ (English, 2010: ix). This opens the ‘disconnection problem’ perhaps best depicted by Marc Sageman. As he emphasizes, ‘the intelligence community knows everything about terrorism but understands nothings, and academics understand everything but know nothing about it’.

On the top of this, both the concept of radicalization and violent extremism remain notoriously obscure and fuzzy. As Rik Coolsaet accentuates, ‘[f]ifteen years after its official adoption and notwithstanding its widespread usage, radicalization remains a sloppy notion, ill-defined, complex and controversial’ (Coolsaet, 2019: 30). Despite the consensus that radicalization and violent extremism represent a major challenge to political, economic and social security of contemporary societies, the field of ‘radicalization research’, as the authors of the book Counter-Radicalization: Critical Perspectives have emphasized, ‘has been marked by a significant degree of conceptual confusion’ (2014: 5). Interestingly enough, conceptual confusion has probably been the single most challenging [theoretical] ‘collateral damage’ stemming from the ‘War on Terror’. As Stephen Nathanson emphasizes, ‘[c]larity is not everyone’s goal […] because confusion can be politically useful’ (Nathanson, 2010: 20).

Two main interpretations are available here, i.e. [i] the optimistic and [ii] the skeptical one. The optimistic interpretation claims that conceptual confusion is primarily the outcome of the complex nature of radicalization and violent extremism and the limitations inbred in research on radicalized individuals as members of ‘hard-to-reach’ groups (Larsen, 2019). In contrast, the skeptical interpretation maintains that conceptual confusion is basically the outcome of some sort of ‘definitional deficiency’ (Jackson, 2011). As Arun Kundnani emphasizes, ‘confusion is an outcome of the institutional uses to which the term has been put. In these settings, the function of the term is to conceal as much as to reveal; to obscure as much as to elucidate’.

This resistance to interpretation has inhibited considerably the elucidation of issues associated with research on political violence. Interestingly enough, while radicalization and violent extremism have become one of the ‘great buzzwords’ of the intelligence and security ‘industry’, pleas for their abandonment [alongside the rejection of the idea of terrorism] as a useful analytical category have started to emerge. At the same time, conventional formats of academic publishing, e.g. a research monograph or a journal article, lack the flexibility alternative formats of showcasing scholarly research may provide.

Contents of this volume

Interviews collected in this volume bring together leading scholars from their respective disciplines and areas of research discussing some of the most pressing issues associated with radicalization, violent extremism and terrorism in general. Alongside customary refinements of arguments and positions usually embedded in academic conversations, these interviews provide an insight into the ‘behind the scenes’ of scholarly research in a field whose object of analysis might best be depicted as a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. The overall aim in carrying out these interviews and conversations has been to move beyond the ‘conventional wisdom’ over radicalization and violent extremism best represented by many of its well-known slogans [e.g. ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’], metaphors [e.g. ‘hearts & minds’], aphorisms [e.g. the known and unknown unknowns in relation to 9/11] alongside various other thought-terminating clichés [e.g. ‘what goes on before the bomb goes off’].

Books bringing together interviews with researchers and academics have for a long time been a somewhat neglected type of academic engagement relegated (at best) to the ‘lost & found’ department of scholarly publishing. Interestingly enough, while not a ‘standard’ volume in academic publishing, they have an impressive pedigree. For example, Bryan Magee’s Modern British Philosophy (1971) and Talking Philosophy (1978), a collection of interviews with some of the most renowned academics and luminaries of the 20th century, are considered a ‘standard’ of scholarly excellence. Moreover, the ‘interview format’ has also found its way into ‘mainstream’ political theory as two leading contemporary scholars published a book-length conversation, i.e. Michael Walzer’s Justice is a Steady Work: A Conversation on Political Theory (2020) and Nancy Fraser’s Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (2018). Ultimately, Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds’ Philosophy Bites, a multi-volume collection of interviews includes some of the finest dialogues with leading contemporary philosophers (2010, 2012, 2014; Finn, 2021). Equally interesting has been a set of interviews on the phenomenon of globalization published in a journal special issue of Globalizations (James and Steger, 2014).

Each of the interviews published in this volume addresses various research problems and challenges associated with radicalization and violent extremism. While post-9/11 scholarship on political violence brought to the forefront issues previously compartmentalized in specialized courses on intelligence and security studies, several conceptual, empirical and policy-oriented issues have been left either ignored or taken for granted. These interviews therefore aim to compensate – at least in part – for a sort of negligence research on political violence has been grappling with. At the same time, a personal dimension is also emanating from these dialogues bearing important implications for future research as several of the interviewees unveil different trajectories that led them to develop a scholarly interest in issues associated with political violence.

Topics tackled in these interviews and conversations include (but do not remain limited to) issues as diverse as the genealogy of radicalization and violent extremism, the rhetoric of emergency politics (‘the language of fear’), the ethics of securitization, mutual radicalization, the challenges arising out of the relationship between cognitive and behavioral radicalization, Islamism bias in ‘radicalization studies’, the disconnection gap between theory and practice in research on political violence, the ethics of espionage [as an integral element of the ‘War on Terror’], the epistemic dimension of radicalization, knowledge production in terrorism research, the different conceptions of violent extremism and the problems they raise, limitations of conceptualizing radicalization and violent extremism by applying causality pathways (e.g. the ‘staircase to terrorism’ model), application of the just war conceptual framework to radicalization and violent extremism, the ethics of exceptional means when addressing security-related issues, etc.

The introductory interview with C.A.J. Coady sets the discussion over radicalization and violent extremism in a wider context of the study of violence and associated phenomena including terrorism, war, pacifism etc. The initial part of the interview examines different definitions of violence and the various problems each of these definitions raises. At the same time, he identifies the many concepts that have been used to provide a sort of essence for the different forms of violence. In particular, based on his previous research on violence (e.g. Coady, 1985, 2007 [Chapter 2]), he distinguishes between force and violence. The central part of this interview is devoted to the explication of his reflections on terrorism and the concept of radicalization itself. Moreover, he also identifies the most pressing contemporary challenges facing scholars working on issues related to violent extremism and political violence in general. As one of the leading authors from the analytic philosophical tradition, his reflections on the different concepts and ideas associated with violence, e.g. abuse, force etc. provide a much-needed cl...