Radicalisation Studies: A Critical Social Scientific Analysis of Process, Context, and Transformation

I was interviewed by a German-born international studies student of Palestinian origin in relation to my take on radicalisation, what motivates me, how I switch on my students, and where my work is headed. Here are my responses to numerous questions structured under principal themes:

1. Initial Interest and Personal Background

The main concerns in relation to what sparked my interest about radicalisation are the fact that I wanted to try and carry out an honest assessment of the issues to do with radicalisation because too much was and remains a top-down focus that is about urgent solutions to urgent problems, which tends to smother the issue and generalise the concerns because of the immediacy and urgency. At the same time, too many in the communities use a black-and-white perspective in relation to the idea that radicalisation is only a manifestation of legitimate resistance, which it is often the case, but not always. The fact is that there needs to be much greater qualification of how this radicalisation works in practice so that it doesn’t do harm in the way that violent extremism does. I wanted to find a middle ground between predetermined notions in policy worlds and reactionary thinking in community contexts because in the middle there is quite a degree of nuance and sophistication that can help all parties to prevent these issues from occurring because they affect us all.

The main issue that got me fundamentally absorbed in the field was in 2005 when the events of 7/7 occurred, which is when there were three suicide bombers and a bus bombing on a sunny July morning, killing over 50 people and injuring hundreds. This was the first time something like this had occurred to such a scale in the UK context and it implicated British born Muslims/ I think it really tore apart a generation like mine at the time which felt entirely British and entirely Muslim and didn’t feel any degree of conflict between these immense concepts, but the ways in which the media reacted and also the political response was to try and suggest that they can’t be compatibility between the two and that it’s because of this that we have extremism and the only way to limit extremism is to moderate Muslims in a unidirectional way which I thought was entirely unhealthy and unhelpful and of course redundant because of its ahistorical application. I’d also recently come out of a spell in government as a senior researcher, so I understood the mechanisms inside, certainly from a research perspective, and I’m also somebody who’s from the communities, as it were, and I had researched and written about issues to do with identity, belonging, and inclusion for many years up to this point, of course, ever since then.

2. Intellectual Influences and Academic Journey

I’m rarely somebody who finds an individual on their own as a significant influence; however, there’s a body of literature that is progressive and largely left-leaning, which is very critical of dominant discourses and provides alternative ways of epistemologically appreciating the world and all of its nuances without recourse to very dogmatic thinking and application that can perhaps make problems worse in my eyes. Here, there are people like John Rex, Sally Tomlinson, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, and Stuart Hall, but also people like Edward Said. There is also plenty of contemporary scholarship from lots of smart young people all over the world attempting to decolonise knowledge in ways we haven’t seen in the past.

I’m lucky to have had opportunities to be a professor in three countries now. Teaching and living in Istanbul, a city like no other on Earth, has allowed me to travel across the country and region, which was a privilege. Here in The Hague now for over six years, I am in the international city of peace and justice currently. It feels important to address global justice issues, of which radicalisation is an important element. I think diversity on its own is an important concept we sometimes reduce to risks and problems when in fact differences are tremendous assets, but this is largely to do with our thinking in relation to progress because too much framing uses the idea of a zero-sum game. The reality is that immigration is absolutely essential for the future of western Europe, but the problem is that it’s not managed well, which leads to all sorts of spillover effects that politicians misdirect and commentators focus on problems of isolated communities not wanting to mix or cultural values that are entirely alien to the European space and all sorts of other nonsense, which are reductive and essentialist ideas that are put together by lazy hacks and co-opted scholars.

3. Conceptual Understanding of Radicalisation

Radicalisation is both a process and an outcome. Radicalisation doesn’t have to imply negativity; it could actually refer to progressive thinking and practices. But too often it is associated with extremism and terrorism only. Also, the concept is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in relation to scientific methods and approaches, and we need to think of joint ideas much more dynamically than we have been.

In many ways, radicalisation is all about identity and belonging, and with Muslim communities facing all sorts of problems in the West and in the South of the world, we are finding that these issues are a major concern when there is quite a degree of Islamophobia and exclusion that faces this group in particular, which is highly problematic and deeply worrying. This doesn’t mean that all the excluded Muslims in the world are vulnerable to extremism and radicalisation, as it is only the few who do take those steps, and there are always individual-level triggers to maintain. But often the radicalisation of those that do take action is actually framed around bigger issues of exclusion facing Muslims, observed or perceived, so it isn’t unrelated to the bigger picture.

4. Broader Context and Critical Analysis

Many thanks for the question to do with the lack of vision in the European framework. My essential point is that we’ve reached a situation where neoliberal global capitalism is the only model that is being taken up by nations across the world, including in parts of the global South. We are now consumers everywhere operating in a capitalist global economy with the particular objective of having us as consumers exhausted with overwhelming choice, all of which are lacking suitability. What I mean by this lack of ideas is that beyond the neoliberal paradigm based on the classic laissez-faire economic system introduced on the back of industrial capitalism, mercantilism, and earlier periods of colonialism and ultimately imperialism, what we do today is essentially a different form of imperialism but broken down into smaller units such that the main empire, which is the USA, galvanises authority around its approach to money, banking, finance, consumerism, production, exchange, and resource commodification in general such that all the Western nations follow suit now. When specific European economies have local national problems, there is really not much by way of original thinking that helps to think about what it is to be in a diverse, plural world that is highly interrelated and where there are many mechanisms of exchange of labour and capital flows as well as through an exchange of ideas and culture. There is nothing new in all of this overview; rather, it’s merely a reproduction of historic paradigms that have dominated world history over the last two to 300 years. How can European economies and societies break out of the chains of neoliberal global capitalism, especially as nation-states that are increasingly becoming smaller as many more public services and public goods are left to the free markets to produce? This even occurs in once very traditional welfare societies such as those found in Scandinavia. It’s no surprise that we see populism, authoritarianism, and anti-immigration sentiments pop up in places like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark in recent years, alongside the changes to their fundamental economic and social base. We see parts of Eastern Europe taking on a very hostile worldview in relation to immigrants and minorities and differences, including sexual identity differences, such that there is a retreat to a male-orientated dominant discourse that is hypermasculine, hypernationalist, and hyperauthoritarian. If anything, nation-states in the West are retreating into framing the status quo in a way that still operates by busting the central banks of their reserves, especially given the fact that so many are mired in debt that will take generations to pay off, with America mired in so much debt that the interest payments on the debt are greater than the defence budget, and the 2024 defence budget of the US (482bn USD) is 4 times greater than the (declared) defence budget of China, for example.

Critical progress in this climate is fragile as it challenges dominant discourses that aim to perpetuate the status quo in all its forms. Having a critical approach means you are fundamentally willing to challenge the systemic nature of institutional practices so as to reveal how power is abused, controlled, or organised in a way in which it is concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, who are often demonised and made to act in polarised ways against each other, thereby reproducing historical paradigms of divide and rule, which were first organised by the Persians and later taken forward across Europe by the Romans. In this hostile climate, critiquing dominant state discourses is akin to being potentially labelled as radical to the extent that they can be punished by states in ways that undermine traditional notions of liberal democracy, freedom of speech, and civil liberties without any real regard to any of the implications of their actions.

5. Current State of Radicalisation Studies

On the question of radicalisation studies, I want to be able to see much greater theoretical and empirical sophistication. The field suffers from the same problems facing terrorism studies because it’s really very difficult to find access to primary sources, which in this case means individuals or groups implicated or somehow finding themselves in spheres of radicalisation so as to be able to carry out direct research on them and about them in ways that are developmental to effective knowledge production. The current dynamic is often to work with secondary data or third-party data, such as case files, and this is only partially capable of producing reliable findings. I’m also hopeful for much greater theoretical developments because while there are insights from international relations, politics, psychology, and sociology, the theoretical space has still somewhat of a gap in relation to how we might underpin these developments with greater rigour that builds on existing conceptual theoretical frameworks as well as determines new directions in the field while not always seemingly responding to urgent and immediate policy questions that are often driving the agenda. Some of the issues that are going to be important to think about include ideas of how polarisation can lead to further risks of extremism. How some of this extremism is likely to be manifested in various different ways than we are currently familiar with, as we have seen a shift away from exploring Islamist extremism with the greater focus on alt-right, radical right, and extreme right practices, particularly across the global north. Of course, it’s not straightforward to fully predict what is around the corner and what new challenges lie ahead. We’ve seen old issues resurface in Syria in recent days, but it could affect the West and the world. Although it’s far too early to tell. Also, we must be careful about early problem identification. In other ways, one of the key concerns for me has been that when we do explore radicalisation processes, it is often social problems or social forces that have created conditions that have already become far too urgent or immediate, leading to issues of extremism taking hold, such that when this occurs, it is often at the very end of a much wider set of processes and outcomes that deserve greater understanding and contextualisation. My own work going forward is much more aimed at trying to develop a more rigorous sociological understanding of processes of radicalisation across the world and how it links to issues of religion, identity, belonging, culture, politics, class, gender, race, and a whole host of other critical sociological variables that have been of interest to me for more than two decades thus far.

6. Contemporary Application — Case Study

The situation in Gaza is incredibly sensitive and highly polarising, full of all sorts of actors, including the poor, suffering individuals and families that have faced the wrath of asymmetric warfare and the horrifying conditions that they’ve had to encounter in the light of the removal of external support in what has effectively been a concentration camp for the better part of its existence, certainly in the postwar period. Gaza has been home to the descendants of stateless refugees for generations, and now all two million residents are displaced, with 100,000 dead, missing, or maimed for life. It has been a rude awakening yet again for another generation, this time getting their information second by second live from the ground from media platforms that have, at the same time, been forced to close down due to external agitators wanting to prevent the media content from being disseminated to a wider audience, ultimately exposing a less palatable truth. This conflict has laid bare the inherent contradictions in Western approaches based on the supposed post-war social justice model; cries of double standards are no longer seen as extreme speech but rather the manifestation of what has been witnessed, observed, and revealed over the last 15 months, certainly since the events of the 7th of October, but very much before that too. In the 1970s and 1980s, most European newspapers and media outlets, and the more educated commentators, were largely pro-Palestinian because, essentially, it was the world’s worst outcry against injustices regarding occupiers and the occupied, the oppressors and the oppressed, the empowered and the disempowered, but this has become somewhat of a muddied space over the last two decades or so, particularly in the light of the events of 9/11. For one, Islamophobia has taken on far more of a hold in social, political, and cultural life. It is also true that many would regard the fighters in Gaza as terrorist groups, but some others would regard them as part of a resistance movement against occupation — freedom fighters, if you like. But all of this is highly political and entirely polarising, because for so many people, entrenched in their camps, it is the safe option that they take not to talk to each other, when my argument would be that it’s beneficial to talk, engage, discuss, find common ground, and work together at all times, especially when it comes to one of the most difficult and prolonged issues the world has witnessed.

7. Teaching Approach and Future Outlook

I always want my students to make their own minds. My aim is to simply provide the balance of ideas, including the balance of critical ideas, when it comes to thinking about extremism, radicalisation, and terrorism across the world today. In terms of my research, I’ve talked extensively about the issues of racism and exclusion facing ethnic minorities across Europe in particular, and that has been my foray into the study of radicalisation because, essentially, for me, radicalisation is a problem of exclusion at its heart. If students can begin to think about issues like radicalisation from a much more grounded perspective, then I would see that as a bit of a minor win. Ultimately, many of our students become graduates who work in the government department of the Netherlands, and they will be important actors in the future as they develop their ideas and practices, but hopefully their education has planted some seeds that perhaps take further hold later in life. The other major concern is that these issues don’t go away; they morph into new issues and new conflicts because, ultimately, underlying all sorts of ongoing issues are all sorts of historically difficult-to-shift practices, which are all about social conflict, essentially, and this will never go away, sadly.

There’s definitely value in healthy or progressive forms of radicalisation that are critical of practices and behaviour. It challenges the status quo in the traditional sense, but it does so without resorting to violence. There’s nothing wrong with having a healthy exchange of radical ideas, but it should not be underpinned by the threat of violence. To be radical is to be a force for change, and how people do that requires careful application, understanding, and determination because being radical risks being labelled in a way that could hurt their future. The recent examples of students being targeted by riot police in Amsterdam in relation to their pro-Palestinian protesting are examples of young people being radical in a healthy way in an attempt to try and highlight issues that they feel deeply about, with there never being any fundamental chance of the risk of actual violence erupting — sadly, if anything, only on the part of the policing instruments of the state. To be radical is to be encouraged as long as it avoids violence, as this is how liberal democracies make progress.