The trouble with radicalization

Though widely used by academics and policymakers in the context of the “War on Terror”, the concept of radicalisation lacks clarity. As this article will show, radicalization is not a myth, but its meaning is ambiguous, and the major controversies and debates that have sprung from it are linked to the same, inherent ambiguity. The principal conceptual fault line is between notions of radicalization that emphasize extremist beliefs (“cognitive radicalization”) and those that focus on extremist behavior (“behavioral radicalization”). This ambiguity explains the differences between definitions of radicalization; it has driven the scholarly debate, which has revolved around the relationship between cognition and…