‘How Can You Stand Against Radical Islam and Then Go Out and Do a Terror Attack?’ The Role of Context, Interaction, Agency and Practice in Shaping ‘Extreme Right’ Radicalisation

This paper considers the challenges posed by the mainstreaming of extreme right rhetoric to the application of the concept of ‘radicalisation’ to contemporary anti-Islam(ist) activism in the UK. It draws on interviews and ethnographic observations (May 2018-April 2019) conducted with young people in a wide spectrum of ‘anti-Islam(ist)’ and ‘extreme right’ activist milieus (including those associated with the English Defence League, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, Generation Identity and mobilisations in support of Tommy Robinson support mobilisations). It presents some initial findings from this ethnographic study concerning activists’ understandings of what constitutes ‘extremism’ and its relationship to violence. It explores how these understandings are shaped by individuals’ ‘roots’ (social and demographic characteristics) and sense of agency, but also by the context and interactions of their encounters with ‘extremism’ as they understand it. It analyses the thresholds activists set for themselves and others in relation to ‘extremism’ and the choices they make about pulling back from, or crossing, those thresholds. Finally, the paper considers the claims some activists make to be engaged, themselves, in practices of countering extremism (of all kinds) and the possibility that, in some contexts, movements of the ‘extreme right’ might prevent rather than facilitate radicalisation. The paper concludes with some reflections on what these findings mean for how we understand ‘radicalisation’ on the right, arguing that the current focus in radicalisation studies on either the ‘roots’ or ‘routes’ of radicalisation fails to capture the profoundly situational nature of engagement with the ‘extreme right’. It argues for a more ‘everyday’ understanding of radicalisation that would illuminate the role of interaction, context, agency and practice in understanding young people’s increasingly routine encounter with messages and agents of the extreme right and how they receive and respond to those calls.