Why Study Non-Radicalisation?

The DARE (Dialogue about Radicalisation and Equality) project brought together researchers from 12 countries across Europe and its near neighbours to better understand how young people navigate radical milieus, specifically ideological and political environments associated with ‘Islamist’ or ‘extreme-right’ views. The findings led to the development of an empirically grounded critique of radicalisation.

The concept of radicalisation underpins much of the preventative strand of Counter Terrorism policy and infrastructure worldwide. In the UK, the PREVENT duty (2015 –) Revised guidance 2023 states a core objective to be to ‘intervene early to support people susceptible to radicalisation’ and mentions ‘radicalisation’, ‘radicalisers’ or ‘radicalised’ almost 200 times. Given that the concept of radicalisation was catapulted into common policy and public parlance relatively recently - in response to a specific security threat around so-called ‘home-grown terrorism’ following 9/11 and the bombings of public transport networks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 - it is important to keep a critical eye on whether it retains its usefulness as the nature of threats to society evolve.

Paradoxically, a focus on the process by which people move towards violent extremism has privileged the endpoint in determining what we understand as radicalisation.

This article argues that a focus on understanding the ‘how’ of terrorism, which the concept of radicalisation offers, remains important. However, paradoxically, a focus on the process by which people move towards violent extremism has privileged the endpoint in determining what we understand as radicalisation and stunted a more holistic understanding of how people engage in, but also resist, political violence. This is because studies of radicalisation start by selecting cases where acts of terrorism or violent extremism have been committed and retrospectively identify the stages through which individuals progress towards that point.

For policymakers, there is a self-evident public safety logic in focusing on actors who cross the violence threshold. For researchers, it also provides a clear target population for study and allows trajectories to that point to be traced, compared, and modelled. However, there are inherent limitations to explaining involvement in violent extremism by studying only those who have committed terrorist acts while excluding those who move in the same milieu but do not become violent extremists. By selecting on the dependent variable (a violence outcome), the terrorist act appears de facto as the single outcome of the radicalisation process when only a small proportion of those who hold radical, or even extreme, ideas go on to commit acts of violence.

To avoid this endpoint determinism, the DARE project selected radical milieus both online and offline, as its central unit of analysis. These were milieus associated with both ‘right-wing extremist’ and ‘Islamist’ ideologies and included a wide range of contexts including political movements and parties, prisons, online forums and networks, and church and other faith groups. Researchers engaged directly with young people (aged 15-30) in situ, conducting interviews, observations, and discussions to capture lived experiences as they unfolded. In total over 500 observations and just under 400 semi-structured interviews were conducted with young people active across nine ‘right-wing extremist’ (184 interviews) and ten ‘Islamist’ (199 interviews) radical milieus.

A key finding of the study is that radicalisation should not be viewed as a linear pathway towards violence. Rather, engagement in violence laden milieus can also result in non-radicalisation. The concept of non-radicalisation is not new – a small number of studies of such pathways have sought to explain non-involvement in terrorist violence among radical actors or among wider populations in political violence laden contexts. These studies deploy distinctions between attitudinal and behavioural (or non-violent and violent) extremism to determine a non-violent ‘control group’ and identify the presence/absence of risk/protective factors against which trajectories ending in violence can be compared. While providing important insights, this approach has inherent limitations, not least because it relies on absolute distinctions between ‘target’ and ‘control’ groups that are themselves slippery and falls back on the determining role of a violence outcome in understanding radicalisation. It also limits the capacity to map, and explain, the range of different non-radicalisation journeys radical actors follow.

Radicalisation and non-radicalisation are viewed as existing on a continuum along which individuals engaged in radical milieus may move in either direction in trajectories of what might be called partial, stalled, or reversed radicalisation.

In contrast, the DARE project understands non-radicalisation not as the absence of radicalisation to be explained by individuals’ moral opposition to violence, awareness of the costs of radical activism, or the presence of psychological, socio-demographic, or relational protective factors. Rather, radicalisation and non-radicalisation are viewed as existing on a continuum along which individuals engaged in radical milieus may move in either direction in trajectories of what might be called partial, stalled, or reversed radicalisation.

The ethnographic approach of the study allows particular insight into the role of agency and resilience in non-radicalisation. The sustained engagement with radical milieu actors revealed, on the one hand, that many are attracted to radical milieus not purely or even primarily by ideological commitment but because these spaces offer belonging, recognition, and meaning - particularly in the context of marginalisation or social exclusion. On the other hand, it provided insight into how individuals’ radicalisation journeys stall, halt, or even go into reverse as they reflect on, question, or even reject radicalising messages and agents they encounter.

While this resilience will be in part due to aforementioned individual protective factors, an important finding of our research is that milieus themselves are not just breeding grounds for extremism but multifaceted spaces in which ideas are debated, social bonds are formed, and resistance may be exercised. The research finds that radical milieus or movements can serve to inhibit violence as well as promote it and challenges the dominant assumption in policy and media discourse that exposure to radical messages inevitably increases the likelihood of radicalisation.

Examples of how this plays out in both ‘Islamist’ and ‘right-wing extremist’ milieus are explored comparatively in Chapters 1 and 2 of the Resisting Radicalisation? volume and in a UK case study setting in Chapter 6. For example, a participant in the Norwegian ‘right-wing extremist’ milieu whose attitudinal radicalisation led to his self-identification as a Nazi and initial engagement with the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), halted his radicalisation journey after realising the NRM’s advocation of violence was a moral ‘red line’ he could not cross and switched association to the non-violent Stop Islamisation of Norway (SIAN) movement. In a contrasting scenario, the expulsion of a UK ‘extreme-right’ milieu actor from the English Defence League (EDL), when the organisation was seeking to dissociate itself from violent behaviour, precipitated his decision to go ‘full neo-Nazi’ and establish his own movement focused on direct, violent action. Where people ‘end’ on the non-radicalisation-radicalisation continuum is shaped by the nature of the milieu as well as situational and interactional dynamics within the milieu and between milieus and wider society and institutions.

Where people ‘end’ on the non-radicalisation-radicalisation continuum is shaped by the nature of the milieu as well as situational and interactional dynamics within the milieu and between milieu and wider society and institutions. 

The implications for counter-extremism policy are that a strengths-based approach grounded in recognising protective factors and building resilienceis likely to be more effective than targeting ‘at risk’ individuals for preventative intervention. The DARE research speaks particularly to the sphere of secondary prevention and has been drawn on to develop mediated dialogue tools to work with this hard to reach group, who are viewed as immune to primary intervention (because they are already certain of their positions) but who are not identified as likely beneficiaries of tertiary programmes of de-radicalisation because they neither identify themselves, nor are identified by formal agencies, as radicalised. Resilience, in this context, is understood as a capacity not just to avoid extremist involvement, but to navigate adversity, make informed choices and find belonging without resort to violence. Indeed, since preventative intervention is often experienced as ‘suspectification’ or ‘silencing’, feeling misrecognised or unfairly targeted by counter-terrorism policies can itself fuel resentment. In this way, securitised approaches to radicalisation risk exacerbating the very conditions they aim to prevent.

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Hilary Pilkington is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, Her research focuses on young people, political activism and extremism and she was Coordinator of the Horizon 2020 DARE project. She has served as independent Commissioner to the GMCA’s Preventing Violent Extremism and Promoting Social Cohesion Commission (2017-18) and to the UK Government’s Independent Review into Civil Unrest in Leicester in 2022 (2023-25).

Acknowledgements

The DARE project (https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/dare) received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No.725349 and was coordinated by the author. Publications reflect only the views of the authors; the European Commission and Research Executive Agency are not responsible for any information they contain.