Abstract
This introduction offers a brief overview of the background and context to the special issue on ‘extremism’ and presents the editors thoughts on the likely future direction of the discipline.
Body
Writing toward the end of the summer of 2022, it is inarguable that ‘extremism’ has become one of the most pressing and salient issues facing contemporary society. From the rise of right-wing nationalism in Europe and America, to the sudden resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Anti-vaccine protests, 5 G infrastructure attacks, and misogynistic Incel-inspired violence, it can often feel like extremist movements and extremists are everywhere, and seldom out of the popular consciousness. As concerning has been the emergence of mixed and unstable ideologies as individual actors assemble their own worldviews seemingly like lego from the ideas left lying around the internet.
In many respects, the post-9/11 era has become an ‘age of extremism’Footnote1, with the hegemonic ideological blocks of the cold war replaced with a smorgasbord of varied ideologiesFootnote2 competing in an increasingly accessible and vibrant marketplace of ideas. The rise of digital technologies has catalyzed this change, connecting individuals across vast geographic and social distances to form previously unfeasible communities of interest serving everything from ethical veganism to race hateFootnote3. However far from the mainstream consensus someone may drift, fellow beleivers are now only ever a click away.
In response to such a disperse and divided milieu, the rise of ‘extremism studies’ is perhaps unsurprising. While it is difficult to precisely date the genesis of academic interest in ‘extremism’, Schlessinger’s The Vital CenterFootnote4 and Hoffer’s The True BelieverFootnote5 arguably mark the beginning of serious work in this area. Across the subsequent seven decades almost 200,000 discrete academic outputs have sought to contribute to this complex and rapidly evolving field. However, the number of annual outputs recorded by Google Scholar has increased most in recent years, more than doubling to exceed 23,000 per year in the decade to 2021.
The emergence of a discrete ‘extremism studies’ mirrors the experience of several other recent proto disciplines, including Jackson’sFootnote6 account of the early development of Critical Terrorism Studies. Dedicated scholarly bodies (such as the European Society of Criminology’s Working Group on Radicalization and Extremism), conferences (such as the University of Huddersfield’s Contemporary Extremism Symposium) research groups (the University of Oslo’s Center for Research on Extremism), and academic programs (such as Richmond University’s MA program on Radical Right Extremism, and Liverpool Hope University’s MRes in Extremism Studies) have emerged, drawing together scholars with shared interests in communities of teaching, practice, and research. This is welcome, and suggestive of the growing academic maturity of the field.
Despite this, perhaps the most obvious shortcomings of academic efforts around the study of extremism line in the question of ownership, and the existence of a disciplinary commons. Simply put, while extremism studies has historically operated as an intellectual adjunct of terrorism studies, its growing intellectual heft, breadth and diversity are such that it can no longer be adequately described in these terms. Indeed, as it is unclear to which discipline extremism studies ‘belongs’, those working in the field must be prepared to consider the possibility that it has begun to emerge into its own.
This special issue has its roots in an attempt to speak to these residual questions of ownership, and in particular abortive efforts to launch an open-access extremism focused journal that would have provided a common space for research on these topics. Perhaps a little ahead of its time, we believe that this project had (and has) merit, and the papers included in this special issue hint at the diversity and quality of work it would have included: exploratory, often descriptive, and focused on groups that fall short of the violence or escalatory risk threshold typically characterizing papers selected for inclusion in terrorism focused journal (such as Studies in Conflict and Terrorism). The five papers presented here show a snapshot of the breadth of contemporary extremism studies, spanning the involuntary celibate movement and right-wing extremists, animal rights groups and Satanists. This empirical research is complemented by a short meditation on the ethics of extremism research that would have formed our first research note, connecting the challenges faced by scholars working in this field with practical recommendations for improving research ethics, particularly for those whose disciplinary home lies away from the field’s traditional base in criminology and terrorism studies. We also include a book review undertaken for the first issue of extremism.
This selection was intended to be a first showing of the exciting work that we know to be going on in departments at universities across Europe and the Americas and would – we believe – have shown the world what an exciting and vibrant niche extremism studies has grown to become. In this we were unsuccessful. But our first attempt will not be the last.
The history of where the study of extremism goes next remains to be written. But as the authors of this short introduction, we are clear where we expect it go. And years from now, we hope we will have the pleasure of reading if we were correct in an article published in a Journal of Extremism Studies, or hearing more in a paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Extremism.
Notes
1 Ron Suskind, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism (Canada: Doubleday, 2009).
2 Juan E. Ugarriza, "Ideologies and Conflict in the Post‐Cold War," International Journal of Conflict Management 20, no. 1 (2009): 82-104. https://doi.org/10.1108/10444060910931620.
3 Mark Littler, and Benjamin Lee. Digital Extremisms (Cham: Routledge, 2020).
4 Arthur M Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: Politics of Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949).
5 Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: Harrier Perennial, 1951).
6 Richard Jackson, "Introduction: The Case for Critical Terrorism Studies," European Political Science 6, no. 3 (2007): 225-227. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210140.