Relational radicalization

Chares Demetriou

Eitan Alimi

pp. 559-578

in: François Dépelteau (ed), The Palgrave handbook of relational sociology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

While academics employ the term radicalization often, rarely have they put forward a relational conceptualization of it. In this chapter we develop a relational conceptualization of radicalization, building on relational perspectives found primarily in the literatures on social movements and on contentious politics. Thus, radicalization is taken to emerge from processes of social movement-led episodes of contentious politics, and to be thereby affected by the multifaceted and mutually reinforcing relational dynamics entailed in such processes. Elaborating on such relational dynamics, we identify the interactive arenas from which they emerge, explicate them in terms of relational mechanisms, name the key ones among them, and discuss briefly how these mechanisms influence each other and concatenate to constitute processes of radicalization. In orienting this discussion, we scan the literature on political violence as well as the literatures on social movements and on contentious politics.