Islamist terrorism remains a serious concern for the current security landscape. While terror attacks shock through their magnitude and impact, the media reports individual stories revealing an equally shocking normality of personal background and family life. This paper takes a novel perspective on the Islamist radicalisation process in terms of the psychological and socio-economical particularities often attributed to Islamist radicals. It takes the argument of a non-existing psychological profile based on the lack of specificities in relation to the mainstream population and transfers it to the newer paradigm of particular socio-economic circumstances leading to radicalisation. Individual psychological theories and sociological theories, in particular social learning are applied to biographies of individuals involved in Islamist terrorism in Germany, France, the UK and Spain in order to flesh out a developmental model of Islamist radicalisation in Europe. Data sources are interviews, trial, archival and open source documents. The findings illustrate that the radicalisation process qua process is not sui generis and can be compared to other types of radicalisation processes and indeed common individual and social processes with similar mechanisms of involvement, stay and engagement in concrete acts.
