Caught between the urgent and the comprehensible: professionals’ understanding of violent extremism

ABSTRACT

The present article focuses on how 13 professionals in key organisations in Sweden – all commissioned to design social and pedagogical efforts to prevent recruitment to terror groups that commit violence in the name of Islam – understand and reason regarding the root causes of recruitment and possible measures to counteract it. The 13 informants’ reasoning is analysed through critical discourse analysis, the aim being to investigate discursive practices that influence the construction of a Swedish discourse on the “prevention of violent extremism”. The analysis shows that in the informants’ reasoning, a conflict can be found between security-driven doctrines that strive to individualise the issue of “violent extremism”, and their understanding that segregation is the primary, though indirect, factor sparking “radicalisation”. This conflict seems to impair the use of a professional language to describe and talk about the practical methodology that the informants are developing.

KEYWORDS:

• Radicalisation
• education
• pedagogical work
• prevention of violent extremism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This means “forbidden” in Arabic.

2. Daesh newspaper.

3. A well-known preacher and instigator to terror.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christer Mattsson

Christer Mattsson is a doctoral student at the University of Gothenburg. His research is focusing prevention of recruitment to ideological motivated violent sub-cultural groups. He has a background as a teacher and director for a social welfare department with the particular assignment to prevent gang violence, recruitment to White-power movements and youth crimes.