Theresa May as Home Secretary in 2015 speaking at Chatham House event 'Countering Terrorism: A Global Perspective'. Chatham House/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Given the recent attacks in London and Manchester, the violence of the far right in murdering the MP Jo Cox, and the images of the London bombings in 2005 still fresh in Britain’s collective memory, it is no surprise that preventing terrorism remains a high priority for the UK government. Yet, since 2005, preventing terrorism has shifted, from attempting to stop terrorist attacks, to attempting to pre-empt terrorism by discouraging the ideas that appear to be behind these attacks. Since 2005, the fear of ‘home-grown terrorism’ has led to a policy focus on ‘extremism’ – defined as a precursor stage on a ‘radicalisation’ journey towards political violence. Yet, what does ‘extremism’ mean? And what ideas are therefore considered threatening?
A certain logic appears to dictate how we comprehend an attack having taken place. The perpetrator of the violence is a ‘terrorist’ who must have been ‘radicalised’ to believe that violence is a legitimate action to achieve a political goal. Furthermore, this radicalisation must have been promoted by an ‘extreme’ political ideology that catalysed that journey. Whether we look at Mohammed Emwazi (the British ISIS fighter known more commonly as ‘Jihadi John’), or Thomas Mair (Jo Cox’s murderer), newspapers are awash with analyses of the ‘radicalisation journey’, which attempt to pinpoint the very moment, and the very factors, that caused that person to take up a violent struggle.
Yet, this fascination with journeys to terrorism, and this emphasis on ideology, is not supported by academic research. The fact of the matter is that the empirical evidence is very weak and uncertain. We simply do not have the ability to say why one person turns to violence, while another, under the very same conditions, does not. Despite this focus on ‘extremism’ and ‘extremist ideology’, we are no closer to saying what impact it has on political violence. In the words of terrorism scholar, Mark Sageman, “There is no doubt that ideology, including global neo-jihadi ideology, is an important part of any explanation in the turn to political violence, but we still don’t know how”. The American scholar Randy Borum is even more dismissive of theories of radicalisation: “None of them yet have a very firm social-scientific basis as an established ‘cause’ of terrorism, and few of them have been subjected to any rigorous scientific systematic enquiry”.
