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.
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Notes
- 1.
In more precise terms, for Tilly, social mechanisms refer to changes in social relations such that the changed relations reappear in form across time and space and have varied consequences, either as discreet causal forces or, more likely, as forces constitutive of bigger social formations (Tilly 2001, 25–26; McAdam et al. 2001, 24; see also the chapter on Tilly in this volume).
- 2.
Della Porta’s understanding of mechanisms differs somewhat from Tilly’s understanding. She takes mechanisms to refer to chains of interaction that filter structural conditions and produce effects (Della Porta 2013, 23–25).
- 3.
Our notion of mechanism builds on Tilly’s notion, as developed in his solo and collaborative, with Tarrow and McAdam , works. Specifically, in a series of publications (Demetriou 2009, 2012b; Alimi et al. 2012, 2015) we expound a notion of mechanism that allows for multiple realizability, hence clearing up a common misunderstanding of Tilly’s notion.
- 4.
According to our epistemology , the distinction between a mechani sm and a sub-mechanism reflects not a distinction with regard to the substantive qualities of the mechanisms but rather choices about the level of analysis. Hence, one study may treat a given relational change as a mechanism, while another study may treat the same relational change as a sub-mechanism.
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Demetriou, C., Alimi, E.Y. (2018). Relational Radicalization. In: Dépelteau, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_28
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