Kindle Notes & Highlights
The contagion model overlooks the key point that, unlike diseases, ideologies are supported by reasons and narratives. They persuade rather than infect,
A person might be responsible for placing themselves in a position to be drawn into an activity but their being drawn into it is not something for which they are fully responsible. It is possible to be drawn into something to which one is not drawn.
Ashour identifies four factors that are necessary for deradicalization: (1) state repression; (2) selective inducements; (3) social interaction; and (4) charismatic leadership.
What is missing is an account of deradicalization at the level of individual extremists, who may or may not be members of an organization.
It is when defectors come to see the theological flaws in the programmes of groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS that they pull out.
Hamed El-Said and Richard Barrett agree that ‘one of the most notable features of the Saudi deradicalization programme is the participation of distinguished scholars, scientists, and clerics’ (2013: 211).
convincing extremists to repudiate their extremist ideologies is a matter of giving them reasons, relative to their own religious framework, to change their views.
Extremism is always underpinned by a narrative, a narrative of purity, humiliation, virtue, or any number of other preoccupations that figure in the extremist mindset.
Narratives are about the ways that issues are framed and responses suggested. They are not necessarily analytical and, when not grounded in evidence or experience, may rely on appeals to emotion, or on suspect metaphors and dubious historical analogies.
Apart from concerns about the empirical basis of such claims, treating extremism as a personality trait risks downplaying the role of politics in radicalization. Extremism is, by and large, a response to political realities, and if these realities had been different, the extent of radicalization would have been very different.
Writing in 2010, Eatwell and Goodwin identified ‘Islamism and the organized and electorally resurgent extreme right-wing’ (ibid.: 232) as the two main forms of this extremism in Britain.
