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Abstract
This article explores radicalization and deradicalization by considering the experiences of six young Tunisian people who had become Salafist Muslims. Their responses to narrative interviews and repertory grid technique are considered from a personal construct perspective, revealing processes of construing and reconstruing, as well as relevant aspects of the structure and content of their construct systems. In two cases, their journeys involved not only radicalization but self-deradicalization, and their experiences are drawn on to consider implications for deradicalization.
Acknowledgments
The first author is grateful to the University of Wollongong, Australia, where much of his work on this article was conducted. The authors also acknowledge and appreciate the openness of the six Tunisian research participants who shared their personal experiences of radicalization and deradicalization and made their voices heard in this article.
Notes
1 Some of the findings from this study were presented at the 21st. International Congress of Personal Construct Psychology, and sections of the participants’ quotes and and are reproduced by permission of Cambridge Scholars Press from Muhanna-Matar and Winter (Citation2017).
2 The Arabic translation is “scientific.”
3 Struggle, often used to refer to holy war.
4 Islamic law.
5 The Reform Front.
6 Infidel.
7 Distinctiveness.
8 The moderate Islamist (not Salafist) party that gained power after the Tunisian revolution.
9 A Jihadist cell.
10 ISIS.
11 Forbidden.
12 Allowed.
13 Intense prayers after breaking of the fast.
14 Face covering.
15 Savage.
16 Some of Hassan’s grid results were inaccurately described in an earlier report on this study due to a misunderstanding about the elicited elements.
17 Stereotyped construing.
18 “Nothing but” construing.
19 We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the use of this term.
20 Essentially, the ability to view the world through the other’s eyes.