Extremist timelines: interrogating the politics of time in twenty-first-century violent anti-liberal movements

The Radical’s Journey draws from interviews with former right-wing extremists in Germany to present a compelling account of life as a political extremist. Insights are provided into four distinct phases of an extremist’s lifecycle: joining a radical organization, involvement in and engagement with a violent movement, leaving extremism behind, and coping with the repercussions of once being an extremist and deviant in society. Analyses are derived from an empirically supported framework that emphasizes the importance of psychological needs, exposure to ideological narratives, and embeddedness within a social network as critical to involvement in extreme violence. Instead of focusing on the details of life within an extreme movement, space is devoted to understanding the social psychological processes and factors that help the reader understand, for instance, why one would choose an extremist lifestyle or why one would remain committed to a violent organization. Throughout, insight is provided into which aspects of this journey are unique to the German context and which aspects appear to be universal, no matter one’s country of origin or ideological subscriptions. Space is also devoted to understanding the German right-wing space, both in terms of the evolution of extremism and the evolution of the counter-extremism industry that has developed to address this expanding threat. The issues covered within should resonate with practitioners and scholars working within counter-extremism fields.

While the use of child soldiers has declined in recent years, it has not ended entirely. Children remain front-line participants in a variety of conflicts throughout the world and are actively recruited by armed groups and terrorist organizations. Reports of children involved in terrorism have become all too common. Boko Haram has repeatedly selected women and girls as their primary suicide attackers, and, in Somalia, the United Nations reported that al-Shabaab was responsible for recruiting over 1,800 children in 2019. In Iraq and Syria, children were routinely featured in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) propaganda, and the group mobilized children as “cubs” to fight for the so-called Caliphate. Unfortunately there is a myriad of reasons why terrorist organizations actively include children within their ranks: children can be proficient fighters, and they are easy to train, cheaper to feed, and harder to detect. Thus, recruiting and deploying children is often rooted in “strategy” and not necessarily the result of shrinking numbers of adult recruits. Drawing from the robust literature on child soldiers, there are areas of convergence (and divergence) that explain the pathways children take in and out of terrorist organizations and the roles they play. Focusing on two cases, al-Shabaab in Somalia and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, we argue that there are three distinct but overlapping processes of child recruitment, including forced conscription (i.e., kidnapping), subtle manipulation and coercion (i.e., cultures of martyrdom), and a process of seemingly “voluntary recruitment,” which is almost always the result of intimidation and pressure given the children’s age and their (in)ability to provide consent. The concepts of consent and agency are key, especially when weighing the ethical and legal questions of what to do with these children once rescued or detained. Nonetheless, the children are first and foremost victims and should be awarded special protected status in any domestic or international court. In 2020, countries were seeking to balance human rights, legal responsibility, and national security around the challenge of repatriating the thousands of children affiliated with ISIS and still languishing in the al-Hol and Al Roj camps.

Today, a shakeup of forces and a great power competition have begun on the global geopolitical scene. This competition is mainly due to the rise of China, the deepening of globalization and the interdependence of countries, and violent movements that transcend borders, such as international terrorism. In particular, the increase in China's national power has led to a change in the world order that emerged after the Cold War, and geopolitics is once again taking a central role on the global agenda. The geopolitical focus on the Asia-Indo-Pacific Ocean complex has evolved into a geostrategic rivalry where China is seen as the main threat. This approach is reflected in the international security strategy. In addition, it also manifests itself in the practices of international organizations led by the West forces. We see the most important example of this in the European Union's view of China.

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

ABSTRACTThe key question from a marketing perspective is why has Islamic State (IS) been so successful and how did it displace Al Qaeda (AQ) as the most prominent brand of global jihad from 2014 to 2016? The political and military elements have been examined but comparatively little attention has been paid to the ability of IS to commandeer the AQ narrative by appropriating and extending key themes and using them via social media to market itself as a choice for disaffected youth. It is suggested that IS has done this by making skilful use of rhetoric to position its brand and facilitate recruitment. To illustrate this, eight major themes of jihadi social media communications are identified and then analysed. Then a comparison is made between the way that AQ has used these themes in the online journal Inspire and the way that IS has used them in their online journals, Dabiq and Rumiyah.

This article traces the interrelationship of the roles played by Turkey and by various Kurdish non-state actors such as the Kurdistan Regional Government, the Kurdistan Workers Party, and the Democratic Union Party, in the current turmoil in Syria and Iraq. It considers their varying perspectives on Islamic State and other jihadi groups, the tensions between the region's Kurdish non-state actors, and the differences between them in their relationships with Turkey. The background to these differences is explored, as is their impact on relationships with other actors, most notably the US. The article concludes by noting that Turkey as a regionally powerful and coherent actor, and the Kurds as a distinct ethnic group with aspirations to self-determination, will continue to be powerful elements in the region's politics.

Fascism Has an American History, Too Olivier Burtin (bio) The specter of fascism is once again haunting the United States. After the victory in the 2016 presidential election of a candidate who showed clear affinities with authoritarian leaders abroad and white supremacists at home, many Americans realized that their country was not as immune to such forces as they had thought. On the night of the election, “fascism” was the most searched word on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.1 While the term had always been popular as a throwaway epithet to condemn one’s political opponents, the publication of a few monographs on the topic in the aftermath of the election marked its return as an important scholarly category in its own right. In Fascism: A Warning (2018), former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright cautioned her readers that the new president had anti-democratic “instincts” and was leading a “herd” of other like-minded authoritarian rulers “in a Fascist direction.”2 The same year, philosopher Jason Stanley dissected the various elements of fascist politics, from the use of a mythical past to the vocabulary of victimhood, in a call for Americans to reject this type of right-wing nationalism.3 It was not a coincidence that both authors were children of Central European émigrés who had fled to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Almost three-quarters of a century later, they feared that history might repeat itself. Not everyone agreed that fascism was the right term to express these anxieties, however. On the right, most voices dismissed such language as yet another attempt by the left to prevent a healthy exchange of ideas by marking its opponents as beyond the pale. Perhaps more surprisingly, fascism also received mixed reviews in liberal and progressive circles. Historian Samuel Moyn argued, for instance, that the concept hid more than it revealed: not only did it obscure the profoundly American roots of the 45th Presidency, but it also “[spared] ourselves the trouble of analyzing what is really new about it” by focusing only on what it had in common with a distant past.4 Historian David Bell joined him in discarding the label, pointing to differences between the present situation and the 1930s as well as to the fact that fascism was for most Americans “an alien, foreign ideology” whereas Donald Trump was a [End Page 494] very American phenomenon.5 Other scholars have also raised the concern that using this term could serve to delegitimize participatory politics as a whole and to give new surveillance powers to the “security state.”6 In rejecting the term “fascism,” these critics seemed to share the common assumption that this phenomenon had never taken roots in America. Here I demonstrate the opposite. This essay reaches beyond contemporary politics in order to assess whether this form of political behavior is really as alien to U.S. history as we often assume it to be. Bringing together recent works in a variety of subfields, I argue that the relative absence of fascism from historiographical debates after the mid-twentieth century tells us less about the historical record than it does about the blinders that hinder historians’ vision. Though fascism as a term was invented in interwar Europe, the kind of politics that it describes could be found as early as the mid-nineteenth century in the United States. After paving the way for the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, fascist groups continued to play an active role in American politics throughout much of the twentieth century. Scholars have failed to take this phenomenon seriously for a number of reasons. The first has to do with the long debate about the U.S. populist tradition, which was defined to a large extent in opposition to fascism from the 1960s onwards. The second is related to the strength of American exceptionalism, which has made many historians of the United States reluctant not only to compare their country’s past with that of others, but more importantly to import analytical tools initially developed abroad (especially when those were associated with darker episodes of the past). Finally, the U.S. victory in the Second...

Africa’s Last Colony

The Third World has made no attempt to evolve a common and consistent attitude to the momentous changes in world politics that have occurred during this decade. The importance and influence of these countries in international affairs has declined, and they have not participated in the processes which led to the Soviet-American détente or the loosening of the two blocs. In many ways, the changes that have occurred in interbloc and intrabloc relationships are those that the countries of the Third World always regarded as desirable. But the essence of the Third World's problem is that the structural changes in world politics have not been carried forward to the extent that would make them meaningful for poor and weak nations. The inadequacies of the present system are apparent from the steps taken by the two superpowers in the field of disarmament and in their responses to certain types of local conflicts. What is most alarming from the viewpoint of the Third World is that the present system could easily lead to the replacement of the old concept of one world by a new concept of an inner and an outer world relegating the nations of developing areas to the status of a peripheral element in international politics. It is obviously in the interest of the Third World to convert the present search for stability in great-power relations and a minimal world order into a search for global peace and stability and a maximal world order.

This paper is a theoretical contribution to interrogate and elucidate a term commonly used (but rarely interrogated) from the perspective of the economic geography field within which we work: peripheries. As researchers of “peripheries” we are all too familiar with the fuzziness and problematic nature of this term, and our long-standing research agenda is to work towards clarifying and nuancing it, addressing its role in either stigmatizing or assuming some predetermined destiny for different regions and territories. This paper reviews the work conducted on peripheries within economic geography, and identifies a number of gaps or problems in the way in which this term is used. The paper proposes a way forwards for addressing these problems, in a series of “suggestions” as to how we can do better in researching economic geographies of peripheries. The final discussion reorients our debate towards possible avenues for the research community to anchor peripheries in theoretical advancements and a more systemic approach to empirical investigations. Finally, this paper proposes a holistic framework for studying peripheries in economic geography, which take into account environmental, socio-cultural, and political elements as well as pure economic issues.

This chapter introduces the book, key concepts, and chapter summaries within. Specifically, it defines Islamism and provides a background to the concept and application of Islamist governance. It discusses the imperatives for an Islamic State as understood by Islamists, alongside social and cultural considerations, as well as those of political realism. It then discusses the organizational structure of the book around constitutional actors and violent movements. Extending into a thorough literature review on rebel governance, it situates the study of Islamist governance within this field. Finally, it provides a brief summary of each chapter in the book.

The international community is facing the same global situation and conditions for crimes against humanity that have occurred in decades, namely the radicalism movement and international terrorism. Indonesia, as the largest country in Southeast Asia, has experienced toughening of the radicalism movement based on religion as its basic reference. Moreover, the international terrorism movement Al Qaeda and the ISIS Group (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) have become the mecca for the radicalism movement in Indonesia. How can Indonesia face the radicalism movement, what should Indonesia do and what is the solution so that Indonesia can be minimized from the crimes of radicalism and the global terrorism movement? This is what is discussed in this article. In Indonesia, the radicalism movement not only begins from thoughts based on religious teachings but also the political, ideological and enthusiastic elements of certain groups with different views and directions. In this article, the discussion begins with how religion responds to views about radicalism and radicalism movements, especially those that occur in Indonesia, a pluralistic country with various ethnic groups, various languages, cultural and religious traditions. Indonesia is a country with Pancasila as its state ideology. Apart from Religious Education which teaches how to live amongst fellow Indonesian citizens, to respect each other and respect differences, Indonesia also has the Bhineka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity) as its national motto which reinforces the Pancasila philosophy, with life’s view and freedom to embrace the religion one believes in.

The international community is facing the same global situation and conditions for crimes against humanity that have occurred in decades, namely the radicalism movement and international terrorism. Indonesia, as the largest country in Southeast Asia, has experienced toughening of the radicalism movement based on religion as its basic reference. Moreover, the international terrorism movement Al Qaeda and the ISIS Group (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) have become the mecca for the radicalism movement in Indonesia. How can Indonesia face the radicalism movement, what should Indonesia do and what is the solution so that Indonesia can be minimized from the crimes of radicalism and the global terrorism movement? This is what is discussed in this article. In Indonesia, the radicalism movement not only begins from thoughts based on religious teachings but also the political, ideological and enthusiastic elements of certain groups with different views and directions. In this article, the discussion begins with how religion responds to views about radicalism and radicalism movements, especially those that occur in Indonesia, a pluralistic country with various ethnic groups, various languages, cultural and religious traditions. Indonesia is a country with Pancasila as its state ideology. Apart from Religious Education which teaches how to live amongst fellow Indonesian citizens, to respect each other and respect differences, Indonesia also has the Bhineka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity) as its national motto which reinforces the Pancasila philosophy, with life’s view and freedom to embrace the religion one believes in.

In this study I explore and explain transformative potential in arts-based environmental learning with a focus on water pedagogy. The study took place over a period of four years, where approximately 40 school pupils between the ages of 10 and 17 years-old were engaged in participatory arts-based inquiries into water located across unequal neighbourhoods in Cape Town, South Africa. Educators, school learners, citizens and decision-makers hold different historical, cultural, political and spiritual perspectives on water. These play a role in shaping what is termed in this research the ‘hydro-social cycle’. Yet, due to dominant ideas of what counts as knowing and truth, educators in educational settings struggle to account for the complexity of water, limiting educational encounters to a partial knowing leading mostly to limited unimaginative framings of problems and solutions. My focus on transformative potential in learning is derived from a concern for how environmental education encounters and the sense-making they enable, are infused by socio-economic, political, and historical elements, specifically colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacist racism. The connections between the multiple layers of capitalist crisis and the ever-urgent environmental crisis are not adequately made in mainstream forms of water education. The research explores how arts-based pedagogy could enable a productive meeting of critical environmental education with ecological literacies. Within this positioning, transformative potential considers how educational engagements position questions about water within the social life of participants/learners and inform learning that leads to fuller and more nuanced greater knowledge. Theoretically, I work with an interrogation of critical education theory, underlaboured by critical realism which enabled me to rigorously consider how claims to knowing are shaped by their accompanying assumptions of what is real. Drawing on recent debates in critical education theory, I resist the notion of critique as ideology and engage instead in the craftsmanship of contextual and responsive inquiry practice. This has enabled me to articulate processes and relationships in water education encounters with meaningful understandings of the effects of simultaneous crises rooted in racial capitalism and environmental crisis. My methodological approach is arts-based educational research with a directive to reflect upon educational encounters in an integrated way. It includes two parts informing the facilitation and analysis of open-ended learning processes. One component was arts-based inquiry practice developed for exploring complexity, drawing on the thinking of Norris (2009, 2011) and Finley (2016, 2017). The second part holds reflective space for these encounters guided by the practice of pedagogical narration inspired by the Reggio Amelia approach, demonstrated by Pacini-Ketchabaw, Nxumalo, Kocher, Elliot and Sanchez (2014). Clarifying the intellectual work of a responsive educator-researcher, pedagogical narration brings multiple theoretical lenses into conversation with emergent dimensions of educational process. In practice, in order to transgress the dominance of colonial white supremacist knowledge frames of water, I needed to be curious, to be confounded, to expect the unexpected in the educational encounters with participants and this mirroring of practice was emulated by the participants as they followed their own questions about water in Mzansi (South Africa). In our work together we came up against assumptions we had previously not questioned as individuals. Together we explored the implications of this by, for example, questioning who is responsible for saving water. These explorations required bringing together science knowledge and everyday knowledge at multiple scales: the household, catchment, government and global. It required us to be critical of how language and images are mobilized in public communication and school curriculums; for example, representations of water are infused with history and power in a way that impacts how we know and teach about water. The transformative potential of this pedagogical space is generated through acts of creative expression which are seen as acts of absenting absence, for example exhibiting through play how water use in the household interconnects with gender and age relationships. As such, creative expression through multiple mediums or more-than-text enables a deeper understanding of water as well as openings for interdisciplinary engagement with learning about water. My research found that in bringing together the contributions of critical education and environmental education in practice, two shifts are needed: environmental educators need to view ecological literacy as inseparable from the social and political. The knowledge that is shared about water in the classroom has social and political implications. On the other hand, critical educators need to better locate justice concerns in the material and ecological world at scale. Arts-based inquiry, as a kind of scaffolding for pedagogical process, has the potential to enable these shifts by opening up fixed analytical frames. Making these shifts requires a reflective practice on the part of the educator to navigate the inherited blind spots in environmental learning and critical education, such as dualities. One way to do this is for the educator to identify absences, as articulated in the Critical Realist tradition, and consider how these absences might be absented. This differs from a simplistic process of critique in the possibilities it opens up for collaboration between different schools of thought rather than further polarisation and alienation between educators and knowledge keepers on social ecologies. These insights have relevance for many sites of environmental education practice, such as natural science lecturers, school teachers or community activists. It is knowledge-learning work emergent from and responsive to complex ecological crisis, which requires everyone to rethink and open up to new ways of being, seeing and doing around these issues. The transformative potential of this work is that the thinking and transforming at all scales can be catalysed and grounded through the arts based educational encounters with the participants.

South Africans fought the longest national liberation struggle that stretched from 1912 to 1994. This protracted national liberation struggle has been marked by several critical turning points characterized by imbibing and deployment of various ideological resources. Nelson Mandela, who emerged as the iconic figure of this struggle having spent 27 years in prison, correctly summed it up as “the long walk to freedom.” In this “long walk” African nationalism provided a broad and overarching framework within which the struggle was conducted and a post‐apartheid nation was imagined and contested. African nationalism became loosely understood to mean all political actions and ideological elements that were deployed in the struggle to realize African rights and eventually the rule of the black majority as opposed to minority white settlers. Historical interpretations diverged on the meaning and connotation of South African nationalism. Donovan Williams understood African nationalism to be a form of evolution of African consciousness of belonging to a common race, with a common heritage including long years of defensive measures against white domination. Lord Hailey preferred the term “Africanism” as clearly encapsulating African struggles for “attainment … of a government dominated by Africans and expressing in its institutions the characteristic spirit of Africa and interpreted by modern Africa.” “Africanism” was only one strand of African nationalism among many others.