On 3 February 2018, in the town of Macerata, an Italian citizen with far-right sympathies deliberately fired several shots from his car at nine African immigrants, injuring six. The article argues that this shooting can be considered an act of lone-actor terrorism, an anomaly in the Italian context. Based on the social science literature on this subject, the paper analyses the profile of the shooter and the dynamics of the attack. Moreover, adopting a relational perspective to radicalisation, it examines the attacker's interactions: on the one hand, he was in contact with different political organisations that could represent ‘echo chambers’ for the tacit validation or even the justification and amplification of radical beliefs, including on the relation between immigration and security; on the other hand, he was not subject to their discipline and social control. This peripheral social position helps explain this case of lone-actor terrorism, in a national context where far-right mobilisation and violence have historically assumed collective forms.

Entry into terrorist organizations has often been described from an extrinsic perspective, as a biographical rupture. However, the “careers” of activists from illegal Basque far-left and national liberation organizations show continuities, underscored by the players themselves. We used a model developed by Snow and McAdam [2000] to understand the "identity work" that accompanies integration and participation in clandestine groups. Two major forms of identity work characterize entry into the organizations studied: “identity convergence” and “identity amplification”. These results suggest a need to reconsider the heuristic relevance of the concepts of radicalization and tip over into terrorism. They also help clarify the role of both cognitive and affective group identification within the identity redefinition process for the individuals involved.

Scholarly interest in radical Islam is long-standing and crosses multiple disciplines. Yet, while the labelling of Islam and Muslim actors as ‘radical’ is extensive, this has not been interrogated as a particular scholarly practice. And while studies of non-Western radicalism have grown in recent years, cross-cultural analysis of radicalism as a particular concept in political thought has been neglected. This article aims to begin to address this question, with reference to radical Islam. By treating radicalism as a meta-concept, it identifies radical Islam as a malleable and composite category that is constituted by, and made legible through, conceptual properties associated with four discourses in the study of radicalism with origins in the Western academy: Euro-radicalism, identified with the European left and critical theory; fundamentalism; radicalisation; and liberalism. I argue that radical Islam is under-theorised and over-determined as a scholarly category. This can be explained by how concepts originating in the Western academy to address Western contexts and phenomena function as master frameworks, narratives, or pivots against or around which radical Islam is defined. This is the case even when Eurocentrism is contested by critical theorists who tend to reproduce it because they do not abandon Western conceptions of radicalism but rather draw on them. Academic accounts of radical Islam also authenticate Islam by advancing selective, strategic or apologetic descriptions of what constitutes radicalism. In these ways, critical scholarship, including within IR, can also be insufficiently attentive to marginal and heterodox voices that fall outside hegemonic conceptions of Islamic normativity.

The Terrorism Act 2000 recognises that religion may be a force for bad in its definition of ‘terrorism’: ‘The use or threat of action … designed to influence a government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public … for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.’ ‘Radicalisation’ is the process by which an individual becomes involved in terrorism, and it is the statutory Prevent Duty, introduced under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, that is the UK's current means of tackling radicalisation. Under the duty, specified authorities (such as schools, police, etc) must have due regard to preventing people from being ‘drawn into terrorism’. This article addresses an often-neglected area in the ongoing legal debate surrounding the statutory Prevent Duty: the religious dimension. It suggests that religion is at the centre of the Prevent Duty and that the formulation of the duty was stimulated by religion – namely, Islamist extremism and radicalisation. It will discuss the ways in which the Prevent Duty can be criticised; that it has an impact on human rights that it is potentially discriminatory towards Muslims; and that it does not clearly distinguish between permissible radical religion and impermissible harmful religion. The article concludes by suggesting that religion plays an important part in the understanding of extremism and radicalisation.

Music plays an important role in both the right-wing extremist and the Salafi jihadist scenes as a unifying and radicalizing factor. It is used to share propaganda and highlight specific ideologies. Music is disseminated by various means, e.g. via social media, and used strategically to attract potential new members. The aims of right-wing extremist music and the Salafi jihadist nasheeds are, among other things, to inspire the youth, reach out to a worldwide audience of potential sympathizers, and disseminate their absolutist worldview. To achieve these goals, seemingly objective depictions of negative everyday experiences, of oppression, and the need for resistance are utilized. The songs are usually associated with violent content, and in conjunction with videos, they illustrate the perceived need to defend oneself. In this article, we will take a closer look at the content of four selected extremist songs. Our analysis of the content is based on a triangulation of sequential text analysis methods and identifies the differences and comparable elements of the ideologies in a final step. In addition to the content, the research aims to examine the possible effects of extremist groups’ music.

The processes of democratisation and liberalisation initiated during the course of the Indonesian Reformasi era (1998-) generated a stronger porosity in the State's frontiers and led to the formation of certain semi-institutionalised organisations. The approaching 2019 presidential elections have enabled these organisations to position themselves as political and moral brokers. The Islamic Defenders Front militia (FPI) appears to be one of the main actors in this process. It has succeeded in imposing itself in the public sphere, channelling political support and utilising extensive media coverage.

While avoiding providing direct opposition to the ruling government and the Constitution, this organisation promotes the social morals followed by a large part of the population and encourages radicalism and violent actions in the name of Islam. The organisation collaborates with a section of the regional and national political elites, some sections of the army and police, several groups that are—more or less—criminal in nature, a number of local communities in different areas, and a variety of violent Islamist groups. Thus, it is at the crossroads of multiple political, economic, social, and religious interests.

At the same time, the organisation's leaders maintain their own political objectives. They manipulate the dynamics of the electoral decentralised system to their advantage by obtaining political concessions that serve their personal goals. The capacity of the organisation to impose its discourse on the public stage has led to an urgent need to interrogate both the institutional and ideological transformations initiated by the Indonesian decentralisation since 1999.

The study examines the radicalisation experienced by one group of religious exiles in the middle of the sixteenth century. The English-speaking congregation in Geneva formed in 1555 produced a Bible, metrical psalter and order of worship that shaped the Anglophone Reformed tradition. Study of the congregation's output shows how watching the martyrdoms in England generated a dynamic anger and fresh interpretations of persecution, tyranny and resistance. Conveyed by the worship texts, this radical legacy passed into the identities of Reformed Protestants in the British Isles, the Atlantic world and subsequently across the globe.

Over the course of the past decade, “radicalization” has become prevalent as an analytical paradigm to interpret and explain phenomena of political violence, notably in research on jihadist terrorism and Western “foreign fighters” in Syria and Iraq. Thereby, while to some extent opening up new avenues of investigation, the concept also significantly re-shaped the way in which phenomena of political violence were analyzed and explained, focusing analytical attention on processes of cognitive and ideological transformation, mainly at the individual level. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the main strands of development in recent research on radicalization, with reference to and within the context of broader sociological research on political violence as well as reviewing critical debates and recently emerging sub-fields of investigation.

The right to freedom of religion, enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights has been frequently tested, both in UK courts and in the European Court of Human Rights, where successive decisions over a number of years led to the establishment of several well-known principles. However, in recent years religious extremism has brought into focus a tension between the right of freedom of religious expression and the well-being of individuals (not least children) and society. The Strasbourg court requires neutrality on the part of the state and its courts. However, unlike the European Court of Human Rights, the domestic courts have had to face situations where religious observance can be seen to be causing serious harm and where interference in religious freedom and family life has been shown to be justified.