Understanding the Process Towards Violent Extremism

(Violent) extremism is a reality of the contemporary world that, unfortunately, will not disappear any time soon. Especially since COVID-19, the international community has witnessed increasing radicalisation among young people, both in jihadist, right-wing and left-wing circles. This rise in ideological polarization and political extremism has reignited important questions about how we should and should not understand the process toward (violent) extremism.

In an effort to map and unravel this global threat in a more simplified and manageable way, terrorism scholars have labelled and studied the process toward (violent) extremism as, amongst others, a staircase, a four-stage process, a conveyor belt, a pyramid and even a puzzle. Whilst these studies have undoubtedly provided valuable insights, they leave open a number of important questions. For example, we could question how those that resorted to (violent) extremism would visualize their pathway themselves. Do they describe it as a steady and phased trajectory or rather as a dynamic process involving turning points and developmental shifts? Accordingly, we still know quite little about how these key factors of (violent) extremism interact with each other over time and if we can identify different trajectories with different outcomes. Are those that resort to violence always fully ideologically indoctrinated? And, more importantly, does the identification with an extremist ideology necessarily lead to violence?

To address these questions and explore why and how individuals become involved in (violent) extremism from an insider perspective, I conducted 62 interviews with 26 prisoners engaged in (violent) extremism and terrorism. Both prisoners with a history of engagement in right-wing extremism and prisoners that engaged in religious extremism were included in the study. In addition to these interviews, I used participant-led life diagrams; a relatively new and as yet unused method in which respondents are asked to draw their life course in a diagram, thereby considering spatial and temporal contextual factors.

Drawing on the results of the study, the next section discusses some mischaracterisations that have led to problematic descriptions of pathways in and out of (violent) extremism and clarifies how we should understand the phenomenon from an insider perspective.

Linear staged, or non-linear dynamic?

The first important fallacy about trajectories in and out of (violent) extremism is that individuals go through different, successive and clearly defined stages, and do so in the same way, towards the same direction, and this without hesitation, doubt or intentions (or space) to turn back. According to our study, however, such deterministic representation does not correspond to how these journeys are experienced by the individuals. Instead, respondents describe their journey as a complex and dynamic process, involving twists and turns in their thinking and behaviour. Processes could (suddenly) accelerate, slow down, or stop, causing individuals to engage, disengage and even re-engage. For example, some participants experienced periods during their journey where they temporarily distanced themselves from their ideology, which halted the process. This was either because they doubted their in-group, because they wanted to fit in with their friends or family who did not think the same way, due to possible legal consequences, or because the sacrifices became too great. However, as they considered their ideology as part of ‘who they really are’, they later returned to it. Interestingly, respondents indicated that they were not always aware of or reflected on these internal changes at the time, as they occurred automatically or ‘obviously’.

One or multiple pathways?

Consistent with other recent empirical studies, our study confirms that we can identify not just one, but multiple individual pathways toward (violent) extremism. Both the interviews and the life diagrams highlight the individuality and uniqueness of the trajectories and demonstrate inter-individual variability. For example, although the same key factors emerged in each pathway, we noticed that the order, time period, frequency and impact of these individual factors varied from person to person. Second, our empirical results confirmed that neither (violent) extremism nor disengagement has a fixed time frame. Though most respondents described their (violent) extremist development as a long-term process, sometimes taking several years, others recounted rapid and sudden change. Third, while most theoretical models give a ‘static’ impression of the process, our results show how individuals can differ from each other – but also over their own life course – in the extent to which they are cognitively and behaviourally extreme, which varies over time and situation.

Same endpoint or different outcomes?

’it’s like water.... it might take different forms and can lead to different directions’ (Respondent)

According to our study, there is no inevitable causal relationship between (violent) extremist beliefs and violent behaviour. While some individuals held their (violent) extremist beliefs for many years without these beliefs (automatically) turning to violent behaviour, others resorted to violence without being (fully) ideologically indoctrinated or having an in-depth knowledge of their ideology per se. For example, one of the respondents, a prisoner convicted of non-terrorism-related offenses who had joined a far-right group at a very young age, indicated that the violence he committed around the age of seventeen stemmed from an adventure and thrill seeking motivation, as he was not yet really concerned with the ideology at that age. Only later in life did ideology become important to him, and the violent behaviour stopped. While he thus disengaged from the (violent) extremist behaviour over the years, his extremist beliefs grew.

In this context, we found that different individual pathways can lead to a range of different outcomes, among which violence is rather exceptional. While all respondents engaged in illegal extremist activities, not all of them resorted to violence. Some participants were convicted for translating extremist propaganda, financing terrorist groups, hate preaching, or planning to leave for Syria to be part of and live in the Islamic caliphate. As such, we should not only focus on why people resort to violence, but also on why people choose ‘not’ to turn to violence, or temporarily refrain from it and later return to this behaviour. It also means that we should distinguish between different groups (e.g. non-violent extremists, supporters of violent extremism, contributors to violence), both in research and in practice. Not only does this avoid lumping individual cases together, it also allows for more effective and case-specific preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) interventions.

Visible and predictable or invisible?

A final point of discussion is the extent to which (violent) extremism is a visible and thus predictable process to the outside world. As noted in most P/CVE research and practice, individual threat levels are too often based on visible physical or behavioural changes that are seen as reliable warning signs that an individual is heading towards, or is already in, the ‘danger zone’. However, according to our research, it is very difficult to observe when someone identifies with a (violent) extremist in-group or ideology and to predict if one will actively accept the use of violence as these processes occur within the individual. Respondents explained that their (violent) extremism process occurred mainly internally and thus invisibly, even to their parents, siblings, and close friends. As a result, (criminal) interventions often took place only after the ideology had already manifested itself in violence-supporting or violent behaviour. As one respondent explained:

’In my case, it was a very short process. At least, that's how it seemed to many people. But actually, that whole process has been going on since I was 14. That's how you have to see it... But I can tell you that state security services or people like that, they only notice you the moment you start acting like it. They don’t witness the whole process before. (...). And then there is the moment when you start behaving like that and only then you come on the radar and become interesting. And in my case, that was a very short period.’

While progress has been made in terrorism research and P/CVE practice in recent years, we note that the process toward (violent) extremism is still overly approached from an outsider perspective. This risks reducing individual pathways to ‘snapshots’, describing only what can be seen from the outside world, and might lead to false assumptions that all individuals undergo the same process, in the same way, towards the same outcome. However, in order to fully understand the process towards (violent) extremism and prevent it from escalating into violence, we also need to identify the important distal and internal processes that are invisible to us, which is only possible by capturing the process as it is experienced by those who have lived it.