Event

Given multiple understandings and enactments of radicalization as well as their changing nature in time and space (Sedgwick 2010, Weiss 2015) we are highly critical to the common use of radicalization as an analytical approach to violent extremism and terrorism. We rather argue that a certain distance from popular discourses, which are highly influential in European societies today, is important in order to understand radicalization in its different contexts and as it actually happens. We therefore propose radicalization as the object of our inquiry.In this paper we therefore ask, how radicalization is perceived by different actors, in different contexts and at different times.How are these different, often contradicting notions of the radical enacted in everyday encounters, policy documents and social or political norms?We will explore the genealogy of the notions of the radical, as well as the resulting practices and their effects and affects in a given political and social context.