Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

Successful framing has the power to translate vague feelings of anger and resentment into tangible, easy-to-define grievances. It can also connect local and global grievances that may have little or nothing to do with one another under a “master frame” that allows a movement’s leaders to encompass the wider interests and diverse aspirations of their members. These so-called “frame alignment techniques” allow social movements like Jihadism to more easily create in-groups and out-groups. They help identify and, more important, vilify the enemy. They can even assist movement leaders in marking neutral bystanders as either sympathetic or antagonistic to the movement’s cause, all with the aim of compelling people to join the movement and do something about their grievances. In short, framing helps members of a social movement make the difficult transition from collective identity to collective action. And by far the easiest form of collective action is violence, especially organized and ritualized violence, which can transform complex, multipronged conflicts for which blame may be difficult to apportion into simple, black-and-white ones for which blame is easy to assign: them.