Does Violence Influence Disengagement?: A Comparative Analysis of Violent and Non-Violent Extremists

Drawing from more than 100 intensive life history interviews with former North American-based far-right extremists, we examine whether direct involvement in violence influences the disengagement process. Our unique and detailed dataset includes both individuals who were directly involved in violence ("violent extremists") and individuals who were not directly involved in violence ("nonviolent extremists"). As relatively few studies compare differences between violent and nonviolent extremists (Schuurman 2020), little is known about whether this important behavioral characteristic affects the disengagement process. On the one hand, direct involvement in violence might be considered a type of commitment and investment. Individuals directly involved in violence may experience greater difficulty overcoming various rewards associated with the willingness to engage in violence such as status. Similarly, violence may also produce criminal justice-related "snares" (Moffitt 1993) such as incarceration that may further strengthen a person's ties to extremism. Alternatively, several previous studies of disengagement observe that formers often report burnout directly related to violence and thus individuals who are directly involved in violence may be more likely to experience this type of burnout as compared to individuals further removed this precipitating factor. Despite the prevalence of far-right extremists in the US prison system (Blazak 2009), there is some evidence that incarceration can serve to stimulate disengagement rather than strengthen extremist ties (Bubolz and Simi 2015). To examine if and how violence may influence the disengagement process, we conduct a series of descriptive statistical analyses to identify whether various characteristics differ between the two subsamples. We begin by focusing on several demographic characteristics such as gender and age as well as comparing characteristics related to their period of involvement (e.g., age of extremist onset, length of time of involvement, and types of group involvement). We then compare disengagement-specific types of characteristics such as duration of the disengagement process, presence of relapse, and extent, if any, of identity residual). We follow these descriptive analyses with a grounded theory approach to examining how violence may impact different extremist career trajectories and how these may, in turn influence the disengagement process.