Visions of the future: social processes and terrorism in Europe¹

Abstract

When we think of terrorism, we tend to think of Islamic terrorism but in fact most of the violent happenings in our societies are caused by 'domestic terrorism' and it has been suggested by authors such as Twemlow that there is a developmental continuum between social activism and terrorism. The generalized rise in what the author terms 'a terrorist worldview' has been linked to many different social, political, economic and psychological conflicts but the present paper suggests that this is not sufficient and that in order to understand it it is necessary to take into consideration certain processes in contemporary civilization. At present, I am suggesting that Western civilization is characterized by the generalized breakdown of values and of signifying structures and by the gradual weakening of the models of state power and institutions that previously guaranteed the unity and security of our societies. The result is a crisis of identity which is particularly evident among the youth of today and when this is exasperated by the failure of authority to provide an adequate explanatory system of contemporary reality and by the tendency to resort to repressive mechanisms, all too often the result is the degeneration of social activism into social violence. It is becoming urgent that our societies reflect on more efficient ways of preventing social activism degenerating into terrorism, both internationally and domestically.

Methodological Approaches to the Psychological Analysis of Ethnic Conflicts and Ideas of Anti-Russiam: Trauma and Trans-Generation Trnsmission

“…In my works (Reshetnikov, 2004;2008;2014), I have repeatedly mentioned and elaborated Professor VamikVolkan's idea that interethnic conflicts develop like paranoia (Volkan, 2013), because the main psychic mechanisms manifested in all interethnic conflicts are projection and projective identification; their essence of which could be formulated as following: "It is not true that I victimize and hate X, but he victimizes and hates me". Let me add that in many cases such paranoia is manifested by both sides of international conflict.…”