Socio-Psychological Factors Determining Radical Islamic Activities Among Young People And Countermeasures

Abstract

The paper explores the main socio-psychological factors causing the perception of the ideas of radical Islamism among the young people and the reasons for accepting them. The paper provides various interpretations of the construction "Radical Islamism" and its understanding by some youth representatives in the North Caucasus. The authors propose that one of the most important reasons for this perception is that the young people, schoolchildren, students, unemployed youth, being psychologically unstable, ideologically and culturally disoriented, sometimes conflicting with society, its conservative traditions, are motivated to perceive a new, radical, denying all norms activity. This factor is often used by various types of advisers and religious actors tending to involve in their groups the young people who are socially indifferent and with unstable mentality, who do not perceive the traditional ethnocultural traditions and who want to live in the new world, which they imagine. Family disadvantages, social injustice, the wish to change the world or to take part in this process are the causes to perceive Radical Islamism. To counteract these phenomena, it is important to implement therapy of such processes by legal, political, spiritual and cultural means. These must include bringing the activists to legal responsibility, coercion, measures of ideological and political influence.