Contesting Terms: Radicalisation and Extremism

Awan, Imran; Spiller, Keith; Whiting, Andrew

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-01710-1_2

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Midlarsky (2011), for instance, informs us that extremists kill people in large numbers and are profoundly socially disruptive. Extremism, that is, is connected to violence, a 'preamble to terrorism' (Awan, 2013). Such representational affinities between extremism and disruption, violence, terror and death, explain the prominence within the literature of themes such as security, containment, pre-emption, protection of democratic institutions; policy suggestions directed at re-education, de-pathologisation, de-radicalisation; and the urgency given to diagnosing social and psychological factors in extremism.…”

Section: Extremism As Syndromementioning

confidence: 99%

The Extremism Industry: A Political Logic of Post-Hegemonic Liberalism

el-Ojeili¹,

Taylor

2020

Critical Sociology

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The rising fortunes of the academic ‘extremism industry’ call for robust social scientific scrutiny. We contend this industry is a significant expression of our current moment of post-hegemonic liberalism. We set out the typical definitional devices found in the literature, which assemble ‘extremism’ as a syndrome consisting of six major elements: non-normative values, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism, utopianism and a war on the present, totalisation and abstraction, justifications of unlawfulness. The extremism industry can be approached by way of three investigative spaces: modernisation approaches, psychological and culturalist explanations, and security and policing approaches. Within these spaces, we outline five ideal-typical modes of explaining extremism: consensual anti-fascism, civilisational provincialism, folk secularism, psychologistic pathologisation and moral educationism. We maintain that the extremism industry is analytically weak and politically pernicious and suggest that what passes for ‘extremism’ is better situated and understood at the crossroad of three important vectors: intellectual, geo-political and world-economic.

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Section: Extremism As Syndromementioning

confidence: 99%