Radicalization

The Life Writings of Political Prisoners

Melissa Dearey

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135193355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Teoria e pratica del diritto

Expanding the influence of auto/biography studies into cultural criminology, Radicalization: The Life Writings of Political Prisoners addresses the origins, processes and cultures of terrorist criminality and political resistance in a globalized world.

Criminologists and penologists have long been aware of the sheer volume of autobiography emerging from our prisons. Political prisoners, POWs, freedom fighters and terrorists have been consistently and strongly represented in this corpus of work, including such authors as Bobby Sands, Wole Soyinka, Nelson Mandela, Moazzam Begg, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Angela Davis, George Jackson, and Aung San Suu Kyi among others. For many of those who have been detained for ostensibly politically motivated crimes, life writing has proven to be indispensable in explaining the causes and processes which account for their situation. Embedded with these life writings are narratives of radicalization or resistance. Melissa Dearey here undertakes an international and comparative analysis of such narratives, where the 'life story' is considered as a mode of expressing and transmitting 'radical' cultural values.

Chapter 1
What is radicalization?

From the civil society to the enemy within

Radicalization is a term that is used within many political and cultural discourses about important areas of modern life as diverse as disability, ‘race’, gender, economics, human/animal rights and crime – but what precisely is ‘radicalization’? While its more infamous analogue ‘terrorism’ has been on the receiving end of considerable effort by a number of commentators with a view to achieving a sufficiently rigorous definition (Crenshaw 2004; Milton-Edwards 2005; Schmid and Jongman 2005; Hoffman 2006; Nielsen 2007; Abbas 2007a; Bhatia, 2008), a review of the existing research literature reveals that there has not yet been any such compulsion to define radicalization. However, this lack of definition and conceptual understanding has not lessened its appeal as a focal point for current strategic policy-making in counter-terrorism and security – if anything, just the opposite:

Radicalisation is one of the four strategic drivers for terrorism identified in the first part of this strategy: in the context of this strategy radicalisation refers to the process by which people come to support terrorism and violent extremism and, in some cases, then to join terrorist groups. The aim of the Prevent workstream is to stop radicalisation, reducing support for terrorism and discouraging people from becoming terrorists. In 2003, this part of CONTEST was the least developed.

(Home Office, 2009: 82)

In place of a definition, as with so many formative concepts shaping the everyday culture of modern life, the assumption appears to be that everyone knows it when they see it, and so we are able to proceed with the tasks in hand while awaiting further conceptual clarification. Despite our admitted lack of understanding of radicalization, it has emerged as a phenomenon that has displayed substantial ‘epistemological creep’ into contemporary discourses about freedom, security, identity, crime and deviance, covering a wide spectrum from the deeply personal issues of identity faced by individuals in their everyday lives to the global politics of terrorism and threats to human and animal rights, the environment and the nation state. In this chapter, I will investigate what radicalization is, in terms of how it has been used by various commentators and within a variety of discourses in public policy, the media and academia; and who are the sorts of people susceptible to radicalization, how and why, where does radicalization lead, and how might it be conceptualized as a topic for research in criminology and beyond.

This review of the literature includes an analysis of the methodological foundations underpinning current policy and political discourses of radicalization, as well as some proposed alternatives from other scholarly and/or professional disciplines. This is followed in Chapter 2 by a further detailed examination of one such alternative interdisciplinary methodology: auto/ biographical studies. Here I make the case for consideration of this interpretive or qualitative method as applied to another ‘alternative’ and underestimated data set: the life writings of radicalized actors who are among the most ‘fully radicalized’ of radical actors, and who have reached at least one possible and common destination in the radicalization ‘process’, prison. The following chapters take a more in-depth view of these life writings to explore a range of key themes and patterns that emerge from a micro analysis based on my reading of these and many other such texts over the years. These cover the influence on the radicalization narratives of these writers that originate in the diverse experiences of gender, sexuality and the body (the subject of Chapter 3), children and childhood (Chapter 4) and family life and kinship relationships (Chapter 5). While this is in no way intended to represent a comprehensive list of the key variables influencing radicalization, they do, in my view, constitute a list of hugely significant aspects of modern life that, according to this particular data source, are highlighted as being elemental to what made these writers become radicalized in the first place. These factors should therefore be of interest to those who adopt a ‘crime’ as opposed to a ‘war’ paradigm of counter-terrorism that seeks to prioritize prevention over military or other ad hoc forms of intervention by force. This selection of themes also offers the advantage of concentrating on variables that represent those which have been identified by experts in counter-terrorism as being significant but little understood (e.g. family, gender, prison), while others have thus far have gone relatively unremarked (e.g. sexuality, the body, childhood), but are still important for gaining a fuller understanding of the phenomenon of radicalization.

What is radicalization?

Radicalization as a modern social phenomenon has displayed a substantial presence, complexity and malleability as an emergent concept within expert subject disciplines such as political science, law, sociology, security studies, medicine, social work, gender studies and forensic psychology. These discourses cover a wide spectrum of individual, collective, national and global experience, including politics, education, environmentalism, feminism, class, employment and the range of social movements including the women’s, civil rights, animal rights and disability movements. Immediately we encounter the problem of devising a sufficiently focused yet generically inclusive definition to cover all instances of such a broadly polymorphous, fluid and complex phenomenon as conceptualised within such diverse disciplinary frameworks, while at the same time retaining a sense of distinctiveness and meaning. In a recent essay, Tarik Fraihi provides this elegant yet succinct generic definition:

Radicalization is a process in which an individual’s convictions and willingness to seek for deep and serious changes in the society increase. Radicalism and radicalization are not necessarily negative. Moreover, different forms of radicalization exist.

(Fraihi, 2008: 135)

As this definition suggests, radicalization can be characterized generically by its intentional situating of the individual actively pursuing ‘serious’ or ‘deep’ change at the wider social level in an intense manner. This concentration on the individual is indicative of the focus of expert and governmental concern, as reiterated by Jenkins: ‘jihadists recruit one person at a time. The message from the global jihad is aimed directly at the individual’ (Jenkins 2007: 3). Radicalization is by implication thus regarded as a matter of potency on the part of the individual, and is frequently spoken of in terms of extending and penetrating the social body in order to substantially alter its material or organizational form. In itself, as we will see over the course of this chapter, this does not necessitate a pernicious, dangerous or destructive way of achieving social change, either on the part of society or of the individuals or collectives of like-minded persons who opt for this form of politically oriented activism. Indeed, in a great number of cases, radicalization has yielded many positive and dramatic transformations in areas of social life that, in hindsight, have been acknowledged as having required such ‘conviction’ vis-à-vis individually motivated efforts in the face of a widespread culture of ignorance, apathy or passivity. This includes radical changes to social attitudes and practices concerning areas such as disability, gender equality, sexuality and the natural world, to name but a few. Modern history regards radicals as heroes as well as villains, and at least one European former prime minister, the Dutch premier Ruud Lubbers, has openly identified himself as an erstwhile radical (Lubbers, 2007: 7).

Even with this focus on the individual, however, for many contemporary commentators and decision-makers, definitions such as Fraihi’s are too vague and generic to be of much use as the basis of empirical study and policy formation. Many opt for a narrower perspective, defining radicalization in terms of what it is, how to recognize it, what ‘causes’ it, who is susceptible to it, and (ideally) how to predict and pre-empt, ‘counter’ or even reverse it (the much sought ‘de-radicalization’ strategy). The emphasis is thus on radicalization as a process: while it is often linked to a single manifest act or event, it is regarded as taking place over time in the ordinary course of the daily life of the individual in question. What is more, this is a process that represents an anomalous or pathological deviation of the usual course of normal historical progression (both individual and social). Radicalization itself is thus regarded as an intrinsic or even essential, but nonetheless anomalous, part of the broader socio-historical narrative arc of modernity – something akin perhaps to dissonance or counterpoint in music – which can, in its most extreme or advanced forms, result in the type of terrorist action that has the capacity to destroy the overall cohesion or thematic unity of the (socio-political) whole. According to this view, radicalization represents a phenomenon with the momentous coalescence of the terrorist action or event at its heart, while at the same time comprising qualities that are the just opposite of episodic, i.e. that are developmental or evolutionary in character and thus cyclical; in Jenkins’s words, radicalization is the ‘front end’ of the ‘jihadist cycle’ (Jenkins, 2007: 1).

The tensions between event-based theorizing and the aberration of terrorism in relation to ‘normal’ historical progression have been noted in scholarly research on terrorism (e.g. Crenshaw, 2008). This is an approach that would seem to be most notable in the field of security studies, law enforcement and public policy-making, where the analytic focus is directed towards the nexus of the individual and his or her own personal experience of the radicalization process itself, and the impact this has on his or her intentions (Kelly in Silber and Bhatt, 2007: 2) as a social actor, as opposed to taking into consideration the wider historical perspective that incorporates the process of social change. In other words, some commentators are increasingly directing their concerns not at the social aims or teleologies of radicalization, but at the particular type of deep personal change that takes place within the radicalized individual, and subsequently the outcomes of these individuals’ actions on the existing social order. This perspective on the radicalized or radicalizing agent, who exists in opposition to ‘the social’ and foregrounds the need to actively preserve the status quo, emphasizes the normative aspects of radicalization as an immoderate and thus aberrant mechanism for the pursuit of social change, with the deviant individual as lone wolf or member of an extremist sub-group at its core. Radicalization is thus usually characterized in contemporary policy discourse by its ‘extreme’ and potentially ‘violent’ nature, as opposed to its capacities as one among other possible mechanisms for agitating for social change. It is in this spirit that attention is more often than not directed at the need to isolate and actively address certain belief systems, subcultures or personality types that are identified as seeking to engage in such seminal changes to socio-political norms, rather than acknowledging the relativistic and normative character of radicalization itself:

The word ‘radicalization’ (used interchangeably in this report with ‘radicalized’ and ‘radicalizing’) is frequently used to describe the process whereby individuals transform their worldview over time from a range that society tends to consider to be normal into a range that society tends to consider to be extreme. In some cases these individuals may then take a further step and involve themselves in acts of violence. However, it is not the case that those who embark on such a transformation do so solely as a consequence of their interpretation of Islam.

(Hannah, Clutterbuck and Rubin, 2008: 2)

While the authors of this statement rightly point out that this worldview transformation is not always due solely to the influence of Islam, the mention of this particular religious ideology as a relevant factor is nevertheless notable (see Abbas, 2007b). In his expert testimony to the US House Homeland Security Committee, Jenkins (2007) shifts the discursive focus from a military to a religious paradigm – an ideological framing of radicalization in which jihadists become the self-styled moral and political entrepreneurs of the contemporary modern global age, proselytizing a new ‘mindset’ as part of the spoils of agitating for a new world order:

More than a military contest, the jihadist campaign is above all a missionary enterprise. Jihadist terrorist operations are intended to attract attention, demonstrate capability, and harm the jihadists’ enemies, but they are also aimed at galvanizing the Muslim community and, above all, inciting and attracting recruits to the cause. Recruiting is not merely meant to fill operational needs. It is an end in itself: It aims at creating a new mindset.

(Jenkins, 2007: 2)

The themes of the individual, socio-cultural norms, social change and the ‘process’ view of radicalization will be further interrogated in the following chapters. For now, let us turn our attention to the issue of religious ideology, in particular the role of Islam in radicalization.

Radicalization and religion: does Islam cause radicalization?

At this point, it is worth pointing out that contributors to the debate on radicalization or parties with a vested interest in defining and responding to the ‘problem’ of radicalization differ with respect to the focus on the individual or religious ideologies. In the case of religion, there is a detectable reticence among some western academics and policy-makers to stipulate directly Islamic religious ideology as the object of official concern, though others have shown little or no hesitation about where to point the finger. There has been some criticism of this ‘naïve’ approach to demure from religion whether based on an ethos of ‘political correctness’ or a more pervasive ignorance of religion or theology predominating in the secular west. Abuza (2006) shows no such hesitation in making his point about the influence of religious ideology on radicalization, and the subsequent need for political and security analysts in the west to understand it and discuss it in an informed way that resists anxieties about being politically correct:

Western analysts of terrorism tend to discount the ‘religious’ nature of terrorists’ struggle. We cannot make this mistake; we need to bring the religion back in. This will be all the more difficult because political and security analysts have little religious understanding or training. But groups like JI [Jemaah Islamiyah] base their membership on religious conviction. They will want their leaders not only to have technical or operational know-how, but also to be steeped in religious understanding.

(Abuza, 2006: 76)

Instead, western governmental approaches (with the notable exception of the US, and other states such as the Netherlands and occasionally the UK) tend toward the position adopted by the different arms of the European Union, where a comparatively more open, broadly construed, and complex set of factors and methodologies are invoked from the outset as objects of institutional concern, as well as potential resources for understanding the issues and devising appropriate responses or solutions to the problem of radicalization. Generally speaking, religious ideology tends to come well down the list of variables, or is otherwise clustered together with other ‘narratives’ or ideologies of ‘belief’:

In 2006 the Commission contracted out three studies on violent radicalisation that encourage a multi-disciplinary and comparative approach to analysis of the phenomenon, based on fieldwork. The studies cover (i) the factors that may trigger or affect violent radicalisation processes, particularly among youth; (ii) the beliefs, ideologies and narrative of violent radicals; and (iii) the methods through which violent radicals mobilise support for terrorism and find new recruits.

(Council of the European Union, 2007: 16)

What is needed, according to the Council of the European Union, is not a greater concentration on, or engagement in, the areas of traditional life as represented by, for example, theological issues or debates, but rather the need to embark on new strategic thinking about the problem of radicalization and recruitment from a ‘fresh’ (but not yet worked out) perspective:

If the European Union wishes to supplement Member States’ efforts in the field of prevention, then fresh ideas for implementation of the Strategy for Combating Radicalisation and Recruitment need to be developed.

(ibid.: 2)

The objective is thus to take a ‘cautious, modest and well-thought’ view, in order to devise appropriate and effective ‘long-term’ strategies for dealing with the issue of violent radicalization,¹ an issue of huge complexity and a project that requires fresh thinking based on in-depth and multidisciplinary analysis in combination with past historical experiences of dealing with extremist groups in Europe:

Interest in this subject has increased in recent years. It is admittedly a very complex question with no simple answers and which requires a cautious, modest and well-thought approach. In this Communication, the Commission reports on its ongoing work in this area and proposes possible ways in which work in various fields within its competence could be channelled more effectively into addressing the issue. The Annex to the Communication merely provides a preliminary analysis of the possible factors contributing to violent radicalization and terrorist recruitment. Certainly, more in-depth research and analysis into the phenomenon is required.

As specifically requested by the Hague Programme² … this document is the Commission’s initial contribution to the development of an EU long-term strategy (whose presentation by the Council is foreseen for the end of 2005) to address the factors which contribute to radicalization and recruitment to terrorist activities. The actions and recommendations presented in this document are a combination of soft (e.g. intercultural exchanges among youth) and hard (e.g. prohibition of satellite broadcasts inciting terrorism) measures and are to be viewed as complementary to, and in support of, current national efforts. The Commission however believes that the EU, with its span of policies in various areas that could be used to address violent radicalizat...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 What is radicalization?
• Chapter 2 Using auto/biographical methodologies to analyze radicalization
• Chapter 3 ‘There are so many roots …’
• Chapter 4 ‘I felt myself turning cold like the bottle of Coke’
• Chapter 5 Is radicalization a family affair?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index