“...the concept of radicalisation inherited at birth a number of built-in, limiting assumptions: that those perpetrating terrorist violence are drawn from a larger pool of extremist sympathisers who share an Islamic theology that inspires their actions; that entry into this wider pool of extremists can be predicted by individual or group psychological or theological factors; and that knowledge of these factors could allow government policies that reduce the risk of terrorism. The study of radicalisation, ostensibly a reflection on the causes of terrorism, is thus, in practice, limited to a much narrower question: why do some individual Muslims support an extremist interpretation of Islam that leads to violence?
This question, of course, takes terrorist violence to be a product of how Islam is interpreted and, therefore, renders irrelevant any consideration of terrorism not carried out by Muslims. An a priori distinction is drawn between the ‘new terrorism’, seen as originating in Islamist theology, and the ‘old terrorism’ of nationalist or Leftist political violence, for which the question of radicalisation is far less often posed. Answers to the question of what drives this radicalisation process are to exclude ascribing any causative role to the actions of western governments or their allies in other parts of the world; instead, individual psychological or theological journeys, largely removed from social and political circumstances, are claimed to be the ‘root cause’ of the radicalisation process.
While some accounts acknowledge politics as a component of radicalisation (using euphemistic phrases, such as ‘grievances against real or perceived injustices’), this is only done in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence, before quickly moving on to the more comfortable ground of psychology or theology. While terrorist violence is not seen as having political causes, non-violent political activity by Muslim groups that are thought to share in the belief system of terrorists is seen as another manifestation of the same ‘radicalisation’ process, with roots in individual theological and/or psychological journeys; it is thereby depoliticised and seen as complicit with religiously inspired terrorism.
As Mark Sedgwick argues in one of the few critical reflections on the radicalisation discourse:
The concept of radicalisation emphasizes the individual and, to some extent, the ideology and the group, and significantly de-emphasizes the wider circumstances – the ‘root causes’ that it became so difficult to talk about after 9/11, and that are still often not brought into analyses. So long as the circumstances that produce Islamist radicals’ declared grievances are not taken into account, it is inevitable that the Islamist radical will often appear as a ‘rebel without a cause’.
In pursuing this path, radicalisation analysts supply what policy-makers demand.
Following the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004 and the 7/7 attacks on the London transport system in 2005, the issue of ‘home-grown’ terrorism, involving citizens of European countries carrying out violence domestically, came to prominence. Government officials, first in the Netherlands and later elsewhere, began to devise counter-radicalisation policies that they hoped would pre-empt such violence. Their assumption was that knowledge of the ‘indicators’ of individual or group radicalisation would allow for the construction of an early warning system to detect theological violence.
Authorities came to believe that they could monitor and profile Muslim citizens for signs of radicalisation and then intervene to prevent the drift towards extremism. Rather than providing governments with a full analysis of the causes of ‘home-grown’ terrorism, thinktanks and terrorism studies departments (which had been established in universities after 9/11 to attract new government funding for national security research) began to model the process by which an individual was thought to become a supporter of the extremist ideologies assumed to lie behind terrorist violence. After all, addressing the wider political context of terrorism was a non-starter with government officials, for whom the basic parameters of foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia were written in stone, whereas ‘counter-radicalisation’ policy was an emerging area that demanded new forms of knowledge
For those establishing themselves as purveyors of this knowledge, the period from 2004 onwards was a time of new opportunities, new funding and new audiences, first in Europe and then in the US, especially following the election in 2008 of a president who wanted a new way of talking about counter-terrorism and who was confronted, eighteen months into his term, with the attempted car bombing of Times Square by an American Muslim.
Disraeli once remarked, at the high point of British colonial expansion, that ‘The East is a career’; today, ‘counter-radicalisation’ is a career, as young scholars enter the mini-industry of national security think-tanks, terrorism studies departments, law enforcement counter-terrorism units and intelligence services to work on modelling radicalisation. Of course, scholars of political violence should want societies to make use of their work in order to reduce such violence, but true scholarship also involves a duty to question the underlying assumptions that define the discipline, particularly when those assumptions reflect the priorities of governments that are themselves parties to the conflict under investigation.
Whereas, before 2001, the term ‘radicalisation’ had been used informally in academic literature to refer to a shift towards more radical politics (usually not referring to Muslims), by 2004 the term had acquired its new meaning of a psychological or theological process by which Muslims move towards extremist views.”
- Arun Kundnani, “Radicalisation: the journey of a concept.” Race & Class, Vol 54 (2), 2012: pp. 5-7.
