Countering Violent Extremism through Narrative Building in Pakistan

Abstract

An analytical study of violent extremism reveals that criminal law’s deterrence theory is ineffective in curbing irrational behaviours of ideologically disoriented men. Such behaviours are mostly the outcomes of circumstances where subjectivities of hate, fear, anguish, zeal, and passion override the punitive objectivity of laws. Sociopolitical and ideological violence is the systematic behaviours of the masses to express chronic agonies emerging from the scarcity of their basic human needs including dignity, the pursuit of happiness, social justice, and common wealth. These values mostly revolve around an ultimate conception of equality that is hard to accomplish in ethnically or socially polarized societies because the legal systems in these societies are meant more to enforce coercive public order than to construct a collective conception of justice.