November webinar: Radicalization & Extremism
Dear RP friends,
The Research Office Webinar reviews have returned! The November webinar on the 27th was on radicalization and extremism, with our speaker Cátia Moreira de Carvalho.
Cátia Moreira de Carvalho is a Marie Curie Fellow at Dublin City University, School of Law and Government. She is also an integrated researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She was recently selected as a member of the Thematic Panel on Foreign Fighters of the EU Knowledge Hub on Prevention of Radicalisation (European Commission), and is a member of the European Researcher Community on Radicalisation.
The webinar first introduces the concept of terrorism with emphasis on its connection to societal and historical context. To further the viewer’s understanding, the speaker introduced four main categorizations of terrorist groups that are dependent on the historical period they emerged as well as their main goals:
(1) Anarchists, who first appeared in Russia during the late 19th century, but quickly spread to the rest of the world due to advanced railing systems and enhanced news transmission. Their main strategy included assassinations, the use of bombs, and spreading propaganda.
(2) Anticolonialists, who appeared at the end of the first World War with the goal of creating a new state. Their acts caused contradictory opinions regarding the differentiation between terrorists and freedom fighters; according to Cátia, the use of violence for ideological means is a key identifier.
(3) The New Left, which emerged after the war of Vietnam, and mainly acted through hostage takings, hijacking, and homicides.
(4) Religious, which is evident until the present day, with major events such the 9/11 attacks and the consequent War on Terror, and includes homicides, suicide attacks, attacks against government and the military.
The political and ideological objective is crucial for the identification of terrorism as well as the threat on livelihoods, deliberation, and psychological impact. The imagined threat of a terrorist act causes general fear, as its occurrence is unpredictable albeit rare.
How can we identify terrorists?
Even though there is no accurate profile for a terrorist, there are risk factors for extremist tendencies. These include push factors, such as state repressions and poverty, pull factors such as extremist propaganda and material incentives, and personal factors such as poor mental health and impulsivity.
There are, also, protective factors that may balance them out, including high self-control, employment, having a family and non-violent peers, academic aspirations, and social integration. The inclination to extremism is dependent on a combination of the aforementioned characteristics along with a specific time and place.
The speaker introduced the Two Pyramids Model of Radicalization to explain the complex nature of extremism (McCauley & Moskalenko, 2017). It includes the opinion radicalization pyramid which refers to the cognitive element and relates to beliefs, and the action radicalized pyramid that refers to the behavioural element that can lead to involvement with violence. The main premise of this framework pertains to the idea that violent or extremist thoughts and feelings are not the same as such behaviours. One does not need to be radicalized to commit violent acts and vice versa.
At the end of the webinar, the speaker described her own research with muslim communities in Portugal that aimed at understanding the lack of religious extremist acts. She put emphasis on the preventative measures taken by the local muslim communities to ensure the integration of their members and the alignment with the local legal framework.
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References
McCauley, C., & Moskalenko, S. (2017). Understanding political radicalization: The two-pyramids model. American Psychologist, 72(3), 205–216. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000062