Most studies on politico-ideological violence (PIV) recognize the importance of socio-political and economic grievances, but they rarely analyse them in depth. I argue that this is symptomatic of a tendency of depoliticization in radicalization research in the post 9/11 context and suggest that the study of PIV may benefit from putting greater emphasis on the element of grievance. A grievance-based analysis allows for critical and reflexive consideration of structural and systemic factors pertinent for engagement in PIV and may thereby contribute to demystifying and re-politicizing the current debate on PIV. I propose three ‘ideal types’ of grievances (racial, ethnic and religious; socio-economic; political), which may be locally or globally oriented or inspired, and suggest that a combination of those is likely to be present in most forms of PIV. I conclude with a few methodological reflections and potential implications for policymaking.
Trends seemingly signal the decay of White heterosexual male hegemony in academe. Still, while changes have addressed lack of access to an academic system whose benefits are assumed, critical literatures call into question Western-based theory and traditionally Eurocentric ways of knowledge production. An important programmatic component of decolonizing knowledge production consists of arguing for increased inclusivity and diversity among scholars. The present study is inscribed in these decolonial tendencies and focuses on the experience of otherness inside academia. Using collaborative autoethnography, we set side-by-side the academic and professional experiences and epistemological reflections of two criminal justice and criminology scholars: an Arab European scholar of politico-ideological violence and a Black American scholar of identity and the psychology of justice. We explore otherness as a ‘social fact’ and identify three dimensions, namely (1) otherness as a lens to read coloniality, (2) feeling and coping with otherness, and (3) otherness as connection. We suggest that promoting the “othered lens” in academia, especially criminology, may not only be healthy and necessary for a diversification of views and perspectives, but also epistemologically and methodologically vital for how criminology engages with the socially deviant or harmed Other it is, by its very essence, preoccupied with.
While the issue of foreign fighting has been very present in Swiss public discourse in recent years, little is known about the actual trajectories of young men who engage in this particular form of political violence. Based primarily on face-to-face in-depth interviews with four Swiss male nationals who travelled to conflict zones in the Arab World, the present analysis offers insights into the first phases of violent engagement, by investigating elements related to grievance formation such as collective memory and moral shocks, and elements facilitating violent action, such as legal cynicism. Further, the role of combat masculinity, a set of values providing guidance on behaviours and attitudes to be adopted in the face of injustice, is explored. Methodological considerations and some implications for policymaking are discussed.
Feminist criminologists were pioneers in highlighting that academics’ standpoints (i.e., their social and societal positionalities) influence which “objective” truth they tell. Testimonies, the sharing of one's story, can provide important angles to our understandings of social phenomenon, including of life in the academic sphere. In the present work, we introduce our conceptualization of “inclusive criminology” as a framework for integrating criminological inquiry into a cohesive whole which asserts societies’ rights to valid and complete knowledge as requiring inclusion of previously marginalized identities. In response to this requisite, we conduct a review of published testimonial narratives within criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) as well as a sample of works from other social sciences to inform recommendations on how to meet this inclusive aim.
Scholarship on security has recently seen a shift from traditionally state-centric, elitist and objectivist conceptions of ‘security’ towards human-centred perspectives, which put emphasis on forms of ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ security, and promote bottom-up empirical inquiries to further our understand of what security looks like ‘from below’. There remains, however, a dearth of empirical material exploring ‘everyday security’. In this paper, we are studying the ‘everyday security’ of a particularly securitized group, namely refugees. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted between 2016 and 2017 with 23 Syrian and Iraqi urban refugees living in the Jordanian cities of Amman and Mafraq. We analyse how they understand and perceive their own (in)security: we do so by focusing, retrospectively, on the factors and events that led up to their flight from their home country (‘pre-flight period’) on the one hand and those shaping their present life in exile in Jordanian urban areas (‘post-flight period’) on the other. Our findings indicate that, while pre-flight insecurity is mostly defined around existential threats to physical integrity, post-flight insecurity is shaped by a more diffuse form of insecurity, resulting from the legal, economic, social and political limbo they are stuck in.
This paper presents the findings from doctoral research conducted between 2018 and 2020 on politico-ideological mobilization and violence in relation to causes and conflicts in the Arab World. It focuses on interviews conducted in Lebanon with individuals engaged in violent action or sympathizing with violent groups. Ideologically, the sample comprised a variety of orientations, including Christian right-wing, Salafi-jihadist and Shia militantism. The socio-economic, ethno-racial and political grievances expressed by interviewees are analyzed in-depth and the importance of collective memories, identities and narratives is elaborated on. It is argued that grievances, in order to be sustained over time and space, need to decomplexify reality by allowing for analysis to escape to the global, the collective and the past. Grievances are narratively embedded in a framework that simplifies reality in order to pinpoint injustices and suggest straightforward actions for remedying them.
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