Why do we use the term 'radicalization'?
The word ‘radicalization’ has been used intensively over the past decade to talk about recruitment to extremist terrorism, usually within an Islamist framework. But why do we use it?
This is the question put by Sarah Marks and Daniel Pick, who look at radicalization from a psychological standpoint. The use of the word in its modern meaning may be new, but we have been here before. In the 1950s, western societies lived in fear of communist ‘brainwashing’. The lessons of that Cold War scare are that terms such as ‘brainwashing’ and ‘radicalization’ obscure as much as they explain about the paths to extremism.… Seguir leyendo »