Though widely used by academics and policy‐makers in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the concept of radicalization lacks clarity. This article shows that while radicalization is not a myth, its meaning is ambiguous and the major controversies and debates that have sprung from it are linked to the same inherent ambiguity. The principal conceptual fault‐line is between notions of radicalization that emphasize extremist beliefs (‘cognitive radicalization’) and those that focus on extremist behavior (‘behavioural radicalization’). This ambiguity explains the differences between definitions of radicalization; it has driven the scholarly debate, which has revolved around the relationship between cognition and behavior; and it provides the backdrop for strikingly different policy approaches—loosely labeled ‘European’ and ‘Anglo‐Saxon’—which the article delineates and discusses in depth. Rather than denying its validity, the article calls on scholars and policy‐makers to work harder to understand and embrace a concept which, though ambiguous, is likely to dominate research and policy agendas for years to come.

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This article examines the quality and rigor of the academic literature on radicalization. Drawing on a sample of 260 publications that make claims for empirical research and were published between 1980 and 2010, it shows that qualitative approaches dominate, and that a significant number of publications relies on secondary sources-not primary research-to support their conclusions. Methodologies tend to be stronger and more rigorous in the social sciences than the humanities. Overall, it finds that research on radicalization contains clusters of excellence that meet the highest scholarly standards, but that it also suffers from some of the same problems that afflict the wider field of terrorism studies: 34 percent of the items in our sample were either methodologically or empirically poor, whereas 11 percent were both. The article argues that this situation may have resulted from an overreliance on (poorly controlled) government money, the nature of the subject itself, and the absence of a unified academic "field" through which tougher academic standards could be enforced.

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Recent developments in polymer builders and specialty polymers (i.e., soil shield and soil release agents, dye transfer inhibitors) for detergents are reviewed. Attention focuses on polycarboxylates as detergent processing auxiliaries as well as detergent actives under low-temperature washing conditions. JSD 1, 419-424 (1998).