Karampampas, S. (2017), “Review of Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Terrorists, by C. J. Beck.” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Terrorists
2015
Social movements, revolutions, and terrorism share similar causes and processes. The book considers eight key questions for understanding radicalism. Ranging across the globe from the 1500s to the present, diverse cases are examined, e.g., 19th century anarchists, fascists, Che Guevara, the Weather Underground, Chechen insurgents, the Earth Liberation Front, Al-Qaeda, and the Arab Spring. Throughout, it demonstrates how to draw on multiple areas of research to better explain the forms movements take.
Revista de Estudios en Seguridad Internacional, 2018
This paper proposes that the model "Epic Way in the Process of Radicalization" (VEPR, after its acronym in Spanish), developed in previous works and based on the context of the self-styled Basque Movement for National Liberation, could also be applied to the current context of jihadist radicalization in Western societies. The latter is characterized by aspects such as the phenomenon of foreign fighters, the possibility of spontaneous generation of cells and local groups, the influence of the so-called "agents of radicalization", the lesser relevance of the religious fact, the social environment that could exist within some Muslim communities, and above all the profuse use of the of Internet. The difficulty involved in a direct comparison between both contexts of radicalization can be overcome by contemplating them as authentic systems, whose main process –individual’s radicalization- is seen from a cognitive-behavioral approach as a learning process of violent behavior associated with an ideology or certain beliefs. Functional Behavior Analysis, under the principles of Learning Theory, is especially useful when it comes to explaining the motivation associated with violent radical behavior in the particular environment of Western societies. The VEPR model applied to the context of jihadist radicalization provides accommodation to phenomena such as the so-called "lone wolves", or the spontaneous gestation of autonomous structures. But, above all, the observation that there is a common thread running through contexts of radicalization of different nature shows that the process of radicalization could be structurally and sequentially similar. This, in turn, makes contexts of radicalization, in general, to lose relevance in favor of the individual and the interpretation he makes of each of them, although it is certain that some might be more prone than others to be interpreted in a radical manner by certain individuals.
Studies in Political Radicalization Historical and Comparative Perspectives
Violent extremism was a defining mark of the political upheaval of the twentieth century and is still on the rise in the twenty-first century. To contribute to the study of this contentious issue, the book series promotes a new research agenda on radicalization that is critical, transnational, and interdisciplinary. The series promotes novel socio-cultural approaches to multifactorial processes of political transformation leading to violent extremism. To this end, we invite comparative or case study contributions dealing with grassroots or top-down processes of far-right or far-left radicalization leading to violence, at the level of ideology, dissemination, and political practice. The series calls on scholars of fascism, authoritarianism, populism, and the radical right, in particular, to further reflect on the comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary foundations of existing approaches, taking into account both their historical roots and their entanglement or histoires croisées with related contemporary extremist and radical phenomena. A key aim of the series is to underscore the historical and contemporary links between fascism and the radical right, and to reassess the importance of studying political radicalism in East Central Europe, in close comparison to other European or world regions. Another major aim is to promote a new research agenda for studying radicalization comparatively, based on a greater convergence between various national and regional historiographical traditions while also correcting the Cold War bias towards focusing on Western phenomena in Anglophone social and historical sciences. It is our conviction that the study of political radicalism can function as a driving force of historiographical innovation, facilitating academic cross-fertilization among multiple research fields and clustering interdisciplinary approaches pertaining to socio-cultural history, gender, and transnational history, to name but a few. The series collaborates closely with the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies (ComFas, www.comfas.org) a nonprofit and nonpolitical scholarly association dedicated to the comparative and transnational study of fascism in a global context.
This course addresses the broad phenomenon of political violence encompassing: processes of individual and collective radicalization, civil war dynamics, communal violence, armed movements' consolidation and rebel governance, and the role of the state in exacerbating or diminishing conflictual dynamics. Building on relationally informed social movement studies, it will discuss phenomena as distinct as the significance of mental illness in radicalisation, the role of friendship in mobilization, the IRA's urban mobilization, state violence and torture in Turkey and Tamil Tiger state building efforts in Sri Lanka and much more. It can be roughly divided into three overlapping focuses: a) Radicalization – relational dynamics which lead to a progression from non-violent activism to the endorsement and/or use of violence at the individual and collective levels. b) Armed conflict and Insurgent movement emergence and consolidation – under which structural conditions do groups turn to violence and how do they survive? c) Rebel Governance – the broader repertoire of insurgent contention, what importance should be attributed to the non-armed actions (service provision, revolutionary courts etc.) of insurgent groups The objective of this course is to obtain a general understanding of political violence, when it emerges and which forms it takes? At the end of the course students will have a strong familiarity with literature on violence from the areas of social movement studies, the field of terrorism and the literature on civil wars. The course will draw heavily on the conflicts on which I have most expertise; the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state, in Ireland and in Colombia. It will however draw in historical and contemporary examples from across the globe. The research findings of a recent research consortium (PRIME) of which I was a member, on Lone Actor Extremism will also be featured. Students are strongly encouraged to apply the theoretical debates covered in the course to conflicts or case studies of their own interest that are not directly featured in the syllabus.
Relational Dynamics and Processes of Radicalization: a Comparative Framework
We propose an explanatory framework for the comparative study of radicalization that focuses on its "how" and "when" questions. We build on the relational tradition in the study of social movements and contentious politics by expanding on a mechanism-process research strategy. Attentive to similarities as well as to dissimilarities, our comparative framework traces processes of radicalization by delineating four key arenas of interaction-between movement and political environment, among movement actors, between movement activists and state security forces, and between the movement and a countermovement. Then, we analyze how four similar corresponding general mechanisms-opportunity/threat spirals, competition for power, outbidding, and object shift-combine differently to drive the process. Last, we identify a set of submechanisms for each general mechanism. The explanatory utility of our framework is demonstrated through the analysis of three ethnonational episodes of radicalization: the enosis-EOKA movement in Radicalization-the development of extreme ideology and/or the adoption of violent forms of contention, including categorical indiscriminate violence (or terrorism) by a challenging group-has recently been the subject of growing research interest. Drawing on insights from the field of social movements and contentious politics, we propose an explanatory framework for the comparative study of radicalization that focuses on the "how" and "when" of the process. Such insights tend to reject the notion that radicalization is attributable to a distinct class of people, recognizing that radical groups usually evolve out of splinter factions of broader opposition movements. They disallow the notion that radicalization is deterministic or a simple expression of a group's ideology, holding, instead, that factors affecting radicalization are context-sensitive and interactive. The emerging consensus in the field of social movements and contentious politics considers its subject matter to be comprised, above all else, by complicated and contingent sets of interaction among individuals, groups, and institutional actors (della Porta Zwerman and Steinhoff 2005).
“Terrorism,” a word rife with definitional dispute, is embedded within a process which labels some acts of political violence as "extremism," “insurgency,” or legitimate defense within the national interest. For the purpose of academic discussion, terrorism is a collection of strategic and tactical means, a ‘weapons system,’ utilizing diverse forms of violence understood to be legitimate or illegitimate depending on the positionality of the labeling entity. In order to untangle this definitional puzzle, the course will explore a number of modern political campaigns, which collectively examined constitute a range of political violence. Throughout this interdisciplinary examination, special attention will be paid to issues of gender roles, positionality, movement structure, “continuums of involvement,” online networking and outreach, communiqués and other forms of propaganda, and the connections between radical ideology and counter/anti-Statist praxis. Through a combination of traditional lectures, experimental group activities, and in-class discussion, students will scrutinize terrorism as a discourse and tactical “tool set” utilized by States, quasi-States and non-State actors (NSAs) challenging State authority. These questions will be addressed through an exploration of the case histories, ideologies, and strategies of NSAs including the Palestinians armed and non-violent movements, and in the US, the Animal/Earth Liberation Front, as well as neo-Nazi/white supremacist and anti-abortion movements.