Theorizing Radicalization and Violent Extremism

By the end of 2005 radicalization had become the holy grail of European counterterrorism and it began its global journey, influencing scholarly research and governmental policies worldwide. The myriad radicalization studies produced since 2004 have confirmed that involvement in terrorism is indeed foremost a bonding process, a socialization and mobilization process. A number of the plotters literally jumped from drug trafficking and petty criminality or living a normal life into a jihadi plot without any protracted process of radicalization. Most of the research on radicalization has been conducted against the background of the wave of jihadi terrorist attacks since the 1990s. But while terrorism has become much more diverse, research is still very much dominated by an overall Islamism bias. To be fair, leading scholars are now turning their attention to other forms of violent extremism, in particular right-wing extremism.