Challenging the youth assumptions behind P/CVE: acknowledging older extremists

ABSTRACT

Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) interventions are largely based on theories that young people (especially young men) are particularly vulnerable to radicalisation leading to violent extremism. Youth is seen as a vulnerable time of identity formation, separation from family and openness to other influences. However, too much focus on youth as a driver of extremism misses the existence of older participants in extremist violence, clouds understanding of the reasons for their violent acts and neglects an important demographic in P/CVE. In this article, we challenge the “youth radicalisation” thesis which underpins so much P/CVE work and argue that such work needs to acknowledge the existence of older militants who experience long-term and intergenerational engagement with violent movements. We do this through analysis of a series of interviews with 11 older men (and 6 family members), from Ireland/Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina, who have been involved in violent extremism. The reasons for their involvement are found to lie in family and community cohesion across interconnected generations in contexts of political conflict. The findings therefore challenge the automatic connection of youth and radicalisation and so call into question P/CVE initiatives which are only youth centric. Instead, it is essential to create interventions based on theories of change that understand intergenerational cohesion, grievances in sectarianised contexts and political interrelationships between states and communities.

KEYWORDS:

• P/CVE
• drivers of extremism
• youth
• age
• Northern Ireland
• republicanism
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Islamism

Introduction

Theories aiming to explain radicalisation processes leading to violent extremism are prolific. Grounded in a range of academic disciplines, there are at least 25 factors that researchers correlate to the emergence of violent extremism (Schirch 2018, 22). These range from micro, to meso, to macro levels (Oruc and Obradovic 2020, 2559), including factors such as individual psychology, identity crises, material grievances, ideologies and international conflict contexts. However, across the many factors said to drive extremism, a unifying vulnerability is ascribed to youth. Youth is seen as a stage of vulnerability due to identity crises and family rebellions that come with adolescence (especially for second generation migrant youth) and the intense influence of peers and social networks for young people. Contemporary “youth bulges”, when societies have a “surplus population” of young people, are assumed to be contexts of instability (Pruit 2020, 328; Sukarieh and Tannock 2018, 857). In effect, youth is understood as a time of unstable identity formation where radical ideas can be attractive.

Because of these assumptions, P/CVE initiatives are heavily youth focused. However, too much focus on youth as a driver of extremism misses the existence of older participants in extremist violence and so delimits efforts to engage older people in P/CVE. In this article, we present empirical, contextualised findings from research carried out in Ireland¹ and Bosnia and Herzegovina (PERICLES 2020) which demonstrate that older men can be extremists too.

Complicating the age factor in relation to understanding involvement in extremism has policy implications. As Schirch points out in her discussion of the 25 factors creating extremism, each “driver” is underpinned by a theory of change and is used to promote and justify certain interventions within a spectrum encompassing counter-terrorism, Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) and peacebuilding (Schirch 2018, Chapter 2). Intense focus on youth is proving to be harmful and counterproductive. It pathologizes adolescence, creates a suspect community and legitimises state interventions in young people’s online lives (Sukarieh and Tannock 2018, 854). While many critics have identified the gendered and racist underpinnings of many existing counter-terrorism and P/CVE interventions (E. Brown 2020; Kundnani 2015a; Martini, Ford, and Jackson 2020), this article adds a critique of their ageism. In effect, these interventions securitise youth while ignoring those who are older.

This article will first identify the predominant obsession with youth in theories surrounding violent extremism and demonstrate how blindness to a wider age-range among militants shapes the predominant approaches to P/CVE. In presenting the empirical data from our study, the middle section of the article will bring to the fore the experiences of older men who have been involved in violent extremist acts. Their demographic characteristics are in themselves a rejoinder to the youth focus. While some interviewees were drawn into violence in their younger days, others joined as mature adults. Beyond demography, their interviews challenge some central precepts of the “youth radicalisation” thesis. In particular, they challenge the idea of adolescent disaffection as a driver, by emphasising family and community cohesion across generations in contexts of political conflict as a source of radicalisation. The final section will consider what these insights should imply for approaches which aim to prevent and counter violent extremism.

P/CVE: ‘youth’ as a constant concern

Ever since the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda and later ISIS (and to a lesser extent the emergence of right-wing extremism), research into radicalisation processes and the “drivers of extremism” has grown exponentially. Such proliferation is not without its academic and political controversies, with even the definition of the core terms unsettled. The definitional and normative meanings of terms like “radicalisation”, “extremism” and “violent extremism” are subject to dispute. The prevailing political view that all are problematic, and all inevitably interconnected in a process where one leads to the other, is questioned by many academics. While both “radical” and “extremist” ideas are usually defined as contravening the values of Western democratic consensus, some writers remind us of the liberatory potential in radical ideas. Cathal McManus, for instance, does so in recalling Paolo Friere’s understanding of radicalisation. For Friere, radicalisation implied an “increased commitment to the position one has chosen”, but it was “predominantly critical, loving, humble, and communicative, and therefore a positive stance” to be realised through non-violent, open-minded critical engagement with other views (McManus 2020, 327).

A further important caveat on the discourse around radicalisation/extremism is that the focus tends to be on those who are radicalising or considered extreme by the assumed political “centre”. The role of that “centre” as an actor in the politics of radicalisation is neglected. For our purposes in this article, we do not assume radical or extreme ideas to be inherently negative nor an unswerving pathway to violence, and we stress the importance of understanding radicalisation towards extremism as occurring in a wider system of conflict. That said, as academics working in Peace Studies, we are concerned with understanding “the transformational process through which individuals, and/or groups, experience a conversion from … legitimate political means, adopt extremist ideologies, and engage in politically or ideologically motivated violence” (Borum 2011 quoted in Ferguson and McAuley 2020, 216). We therefore define radicalisation as a “change in beliefs, feelings, and behaviours in directions that increasingly justify intergroup violence and demand sacrifice in defense of the ingroup” (McCauley and Moskalenko 2008, 416), stressing the importance of the shift in position not just towards “the acceptance of violence” (PAVE 2021, 7), but its use. In the case study in this article, we reflect on interviews with men from Ireland/Northern Ireland² and Bosnia and Herzegovina, who have been involved in acts of violent extremism. In doing so, we bring empirically based insights to debates about violent extremism, where such material has often been lacking (Ferguson and McAuley 2020, 215).

As mentioned in the opening lines of this article, multiple drivers of radicalisation leading to violent extremism are identified in the literature. Because of their plenitude, efforts are often made to schematise the drivers, for example, grouping them as micro, meso and macro level factors (Ferguson and McAuley 2021, 6; Oruc and Obradovic 2020). Micro includes issues of personality types, family troubles, financial problems; meso includes education levels, religious practices, socio-economic deprivation, kinship, gender identity; and macro includes state policies, colonial and war legacies and discrimination (PAVE 2021, 29–30). In her categorisation, Katherine Brown identifies four broad areas of explanations which fall into personal experiences, collective grievances, distorted beliefs, and influential leaders/social networks (E. Brown 2020, 31).

If there is one point of convergence in all this discussion of drivers of extremism, it is the identification of young people as most likely to become radicalised and act violently. The focus on young people as susceptible to radicalisation has been imprinted in research from the outset. Walter Laqueur’s influential article in 2004 that “launched the radicalisation fad” (Kundnani 2015b, 19) focused on religious beliefs and psychology and viewed terrorism as “rooted in youth culture of anger and aggression”. Over the intervening years, the assumption that youth are more liable to radicalisation has been a constant of many media accounts, academic analyses and subsequent P/CVE interventions. High profile cases covered by Western media very often attract attention to young people. Examples include those who attacked the Manchester Arena, the Boston Marathon, and the public transport systems in London and Madrid. The youth of girls and women who travelled to join ISIS was a key feature of the discussion of their cases. This public focus on young people’s liability to radicalisation is translated into academic work. In particular, the ubiquity of “young male perpetrators” in extremist acts is noted in many studies (E. Brown 2020; Ezekilov 2017; Nwangwu and Ezeibe 2019; Puigvert et al. 2020). Orla Lynch notes that “in the literature on terrorism, radicalization is predominantly considered a feature of youth development” (Lynch 2013, 245). Likewise, Mark Hamilton records that violent extremism is often identified as a “function of youth”, because young people are so often visibly present at the forefront of social upheavals (Hamilton 2018, 103). The global “youth bulge” thesis, which portrays a disproportionate demographic of young people in populations as a security threat to states, is strongly connected to fears of radicalisation (Pruit 2020; Sukarieh and Tannock 2018).

Despite these assumptions, the fact is that a “tiny minority” of young men get involved in violence (Lynch 2013, 243) – and an even tinier number of young women. However, youth are ubiquitously present in academic literature and policy responses and why this should be so is important to consider. Among the reasons are assumptions that the period of change from childhood to adulthood (Siekelinck et al. 2019) is a challenging time of identity formation, separation from – or conflict with – parents and heightened peer influence. Youth is generally depicted as a time of “quest for significance” in relation to self-esteem, friends and peers (Puigvert et al. 2020, 5). In this turbulent period, youngsters are depicted as highly susceptible to “brainwashing” by radicalisers (Crone 2016, 589).

Discussions of youth vulnerability to radicalisation are often crosscut with observations about the realisation of gender identities during adolescence. For young men in search of identity, idealised masculine notions of heroism and adventure can hold sway, holding out “the attraction of violence, war zones, excitement” and the joy of being in “a bunch of guys” (Crone 2016, 593). Extremist recruitment propaganda plays to this trope with celebrations of “the skills of the body” and virile, desirable hegemonic masculinity on show (Crone 2020). Young women’s attraction to groups like Islamic State is often puzzling for commentators, given widespread social norms that dissociate women from violence (E. Brown 2020; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). This leads to assumptions that young women only join IS after grooming turns them into dupable “jihadi brides”. In both cases, there are problematic assumptions about gender and youth at play that suggest these people do not yet know their own minds. It is assumed that lacking political rationality, they are easily led “lemmings for ideologues” (Hamilton 2018, 109).

Another important aspect of the youth radicalisation thesis is the assumption that the identity struggles of young people leading to extremism are framed by inevitable adolescent conflict with older generations. In some contexts, this is analysed as exacerbated by the experience of belonging to a second generation of migrants or belonging to a social class which is no longer the source of stability it was. For example, Michael Kimmel identifies a commonality between Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and right-wing extremists, in that “virtually all were young men – under 25, well educated, lower middle class, downwardly mobile” (Kimmel 2003, 605). Unable in the context of neo-liberal globalisation to achieve the values and practices of manhood of the previous generations, they are susceptible to blame the “other” for their plight (Kimmel 2003, 605).

Inter-generational stresses were also identified by community focus groups in Winterbotham and Pearson’s study of young men and women’s radicalisation in two cities in five countries (Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands and UK). Cultural gaps around language and understanding of Western societies caused lack of communication between first and second migrant generations (Winterbotham and Pearson 2017, 59). As young people become “unmoored from their traditions” and “flail about” in search of a meaningful identity, their vulnerability to radicalisation increases (Atran 2018, 71). There is particular concern that these unmoored young people are individually vulnerable to rapid radicalisation and persuasion to use violence as lone wolves or copycats through exposure to online extremists. By contrast, there is an assumption, expressed for instance in the US database of Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the US (PIRUS), that older people are less likely to become radicalised or engage in acts of violence because of their social moorings in terms of marriage and parenthood (Schirch 2018, 23–24). Similarly, long-term involvement in radical movements and extremist violence in divided societies is not generally attended to in research which prioritises understanding youth radicalisation.

As a consequence of these ideas, the violent radicalisation of youth has become “a phenomenon of growing concern in Europe and beyond” (Puigvert et al. 2020, 1). What has transpired because of these concerns is that most P/CVE frameworks make young people the primary subject of interventions. As Amit and Kafy point out in their systematic review of PVE, because “numerous studies reference youth and adolescents as groups susceptible to violent extremist conceptions and prejudices” they are “important target populations for PVE policy and programming, and possible implementers of such” (Amit and Al Kafy 2022, 1070).

This targeting of youth is evident in multiple interventions at international and national levels. Globally, the UN’s Youth Peace and Security Resolution (UNSCR 2250 2015) is seen by its supporters as an overdue recognition of young people as potential peacebuilders but by its detractors as “securitizing youth” due to its agenda of drawing young people into ending VE. The UK’s PREVENT, based on individualised behaviours and needs as indicators of terrorism risk, is strongly associated with activities in schools and interventions aimed at children (Pettinger 2020). A 2023 survey by the EU’s Radicalization Awareness Network (RAN) providing an overview of P/CVE activities across 10 states in Central and Eastern Europe reinforces this impression. Most activities mapped in the report encompass interventions in schools, youth work, juvenile justice systems and countering misinformation in social media through projects aimed at enhancing critical thinking among young people (Purski and Witkowski 2023).

In our own EU funded project, PERICLES, the work to create tools to support law enforcement in P/CVE also emphasised the vulnerabilities of young people and the need for interventions aimed at them. For example, a Vulnerability Assessment Tool was developed to enable education professionals, social workers and community police to spot signs of youth radicalisation (PERICLES 2020). While these tools are potentially useful and supportive of P/CVE, we recognised some dissonance between the emphasis on developing tools solely aimed at young people and the interview material emerging from other Work Packages in the project, which revealed a more complicated age profile of men who had been involved in violent extremism. It is this empirical interview work which forms the basis of the later sections of this article as we present and analyse the lived experiences of older men who have been involved in acts of extremist violence from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ireland/Northern Ireland.

The themes that can be drawn out of these interviews prove challenging to the assumptions about youth and radicalisation that underpin so much P/CVE. Firstly, there is the simple acknowledgement that not all violent extremists are young. More profoundly, however, secondly, the interviews challenge the idea that radicalisation happens to people cut loose from their social moorings or, thirdly, that people radicalise rapidly and individually in ways which are decontextualised from their long-term socio-political contexts. Rather, interviews with people who have remained connected to radical movements across their life-courses suggest that intergenerational cohesion and systemic context are key to understanding their radicalisation. Recognising these dynamics could provide stronger “theories of change” from which to create effective P/CVE.

Research methodology

Most radicalisation research lacks empirical data produced by “direct contact with violent extremists” (Ferguson and McAuley 2020, 216). In contrast, our study involved in-person interviews with two cohorts of people who were in the past involved in violent extremist actions from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ireland/Northern Ireland. We have chosen Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ireland as case studies, as both countries are post-conflict societies and research has shown that violent extremism in such societies can take a specific form and that VE and subsequent P/CVE measures in those contexts need to be understood in relation to the legacies of recent conflicts (Beaujouan et al. 2023; Halilovic-Pastuovic, Hulzer, and Wylie 2023). In Bosnia and Herzegovina, we also interviewed family members of those involved in violent extremism to gain more in-depth understanding of family dynamics. In Ireland, we did not get consent to reach family members from those interviewed. The interviews were conducted as part of the European Commission funded PERICLES (Policy recommendations and improved communication tools for law enforcement and security agencies preventing violent radicalisation)³ project in preparation of a Family Care Package and other tools produced by PERICLES. The research approach received ethical approval from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Ethics Committee in Trinity College Dublin and the Federal Ministry of Justice – Sector of Criminal Sanctions Enforcement and Ministry of Security of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, interviews were conducted face to face with seven men convicted of terrorist activities connected to violent religious extremism (Islamism). The offences related to fighting in Syria and Iraq or attempts to join terrorist organisations. Our aim was to conduct interviews with all of those imprisoned for terrorist offences in the country. There were overall 11 men serving terrorist-related offences at the time, but four of them did not consent to be interviewed. Among those who did consent, we also interviewed six members of their families including two spouses, one mother, one sister, one father and one brother. We contacted 10 additional family members of those imprisoned, but they did not consent to being interviewed. All interviews with those convicted of terrorist activities took place in Detention and Rehabilitation Centres (DRCs)/Penitentiary Institutions – KPZs in Sarajevo, Ustikolina, Zenica and Tuzla. To enter these institutions, we gained approval from the Federal Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Security. The research team that entered the prisons and conducted interviews was a local team of researchers consisting of two males and one female. It is important to note we needed to match gender, as those imprisoned would have not responded to a female interviewer. Also, female family members interviewed required a female interviewer, particularly when the conversation was held at home. The team was ethnically Bosnian (Muslim), as those imprisoned would not have responded to other ethnicities.

In Ireland, we spoke to four respondents who were members or former members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Some of the IRA members were imprisoned in the past, others were not despite conducting violent actions. While some were originally from Northern Ireland/the north of Ireland and others from the Republic of Ireland, all are now based in the Republic. It is not possible to be certain if truth about membership status was given and it is possible that some interviewees said they were former members to protect themselves by concealing the truth that they are still active members in fear of prosecution and imprisonment.

To reach IRA members was hard. It involved time spent in the community (certain neighbourhoods in Dublin are known to be IRA friendly), gaining trust of the gatekeepers and using a snowballing effect afterwards. It was helpful that the researcher conducting these interviews was a Catholic male from working class Dublin, as IRA members are wary of researchers from other backgrounds. We were not able to reach family members, but this was not surprising as family members are not seen/acting as separate entities from the radicalised individual. As will become clear in the data and analysis, they are often very supportive of the radicalised member. In turn, IRA members were very supportive and protective of family members, making it impossible to reach them without long term ethnographical commitment which time did allow for in the PERICLES project.

Nevertheless, we managed to interview 19 individuals in total. The interviews were all transcribed, anonymised, assigned numbers (coded BH and RoI respectively) and saved as password-protected documents. The transcripts were subjected to qualitative thematic analysis (Brown and Clarke 2006). Both authors coded patterns in the data separately and inductively. Thereafter, we met on two occasions to discuss these patterns and organise them into themes. We also had in-depth reflexive discussions (Davis 1999) with our research team in Bosnia (one 3-h long discussion recorded) and our researcher in Ireland (three 1-h long discussions non-recorded but notes were taken) which greatly contributed to the interpretation of the research findings.

It is important to stress that while this article is written with the focus on 19 individual interviews, the first author had engagement with Bosnia and Herzegovina for the full 3 years of the PERICLES project and is native to the region. The second author has lived in Ireland for 25 years. Furthermore, as Okely (1994) argues, when analysing qualitative data involving participation in the field, the number of interviewed people is not an adequate guide to the amount and nature of information collected, since the number of “informants” is much bigger than the number of interview respondents. Thus, tacit knowledge gained through personal experience within the research community contributed to this study, as well as in an ethnographically “unstructured” yet insightful way (Hammersley 1998; Reinharz 1997). In these encounters, we found key thematic insights described in the next three sections below.

Violent extremists are not all young

The demographic profile of our interviewees was the first thing that caught our attention while we were researchers on the PERICLES project which built P/CVE tools based on assumptions that young people were those in need of interventions. These assumptions and outputs sat rather incongruously with the age profile of those we interviewed in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ireland. This was especially evident in the BiH case, where, as the fieldnotes record “The interviewees were all male and aged from 29 to 60, and their mean age was 39 and 1 belonged to the early adulthood (i.e. 29), 3 to middle adulthood (i.e. 31, 32 and 35) and 3 to late adulthood (i.e. 48 (two) and 60)” (Field Notes, 2019). Some of the interviewees were fathers and one was even a grandfather.

Similarly, all those interviewed in Dublin were older men, now in their 70s or above. Undeniably, they became involved in Republican and socialist politics as young men during the onset of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. For example, one participant recalled his initial engagement as a student (RoI1). Notably, though, these men remained engaged in violence throughout their adult lives, up to the point of the IRA ceasefire and Northern Ireland peace process. Our interviewees are among IRA members who accepted the peace process and are not involved in continuing violence, but offered views on why dissident Republicanism still arises in the post-peace process era. While they radicalised as young men, their involvement over much of their life-courses suggests that radicalisation is not a rapid and individualised process, nor the product of loss of social moorings or intergenerational conflict. The same points can be supported with reference to the Bosnian interviewees. Together, their lived experiences of involvement in extremist movements provide a rejoinder to many of the assumptions underpinning P/CVE focused on youth.

Young (and older) extremists are not “cut loose from their social moorings”

As discussed in the literature review, the psychological struggle to assert identity and find oneself through conflict with parents and communal expectations is seen as a core reason why young people are susceptible to violent extremism. Yet our findings challenge such preconceptions, as our contextualised analyses point in the opposite direction. In the first instance, the Bosnian interviewees were of a range of ages, but mostly deeply ensconced in family networks, rather than adrift. Even in prison, most reported continuing strong relationships with family and across the generations, as the excerpts below exemplify:

I have a good relationship with them: I have a father and a mother (divorced). I have two brothers and two sisters. Married and have four children. I had a normal life. (BH1)

I have five sisters and a brother. I have a very good relationship with the family. I am married; I have six children and two grandchildren. (BH2)

More pointedly in the Northern Irish case, engagement with violent extremism emerged in concordance with inter-generational traditions, rather than in rejection of the preceding adult world. As RoI3 put it bluntly, “It all comes down to families, 90% chance it’s all families”. In an extensive reflection on this inter-generational dynamic and its impact on contemporary dissident republicanism, RoI2 offered the following:

The young people they recruit come from their own families. These are people from deeply republican families that have a long tradition of resistance against colonialism … There’s a big family element, their fathers and grandfathers were involved in republican and revolutionary struggle. This can’t be understated, republican beliefs run through generations of families and you will often see the same surnames coming up today as were there in the 1980s. Families are steeped in republican tradition and by the time they are young adults they have a strong commitment to revolutionary beliefs. (RoI2)

The same interviewee (RoI2) went on to stress that growing up in a community context that romanticises violence and glorifies historical narratives of struggle, most young people are recruited through families and intergenerational links.

Our findings tally with others who have done empirically based research on radicalisation in the Northern Irish context. Researching the radicalisation of a student organisation in early 1970s Belfast, Stephen Beach found that the exclusion of the group from the university campus led to the establishment of an office in a working-class area where the group was impacted by the “radical and violent Republican tradition” historical to the community (Beach 1977, 312). Decades later, Ferguson and McAuley find the same dynamic among their interviewees, noting the importance of Republican lineage dating back to 1916 for those involved in violence on one side, with Orange Order socialisation between generations pulling in Loyalists (Ferguson and McAuley 2020, 223). McManus too notes a similar story with leaders in Northern Ireland coming from “intergenerational connections to the Republican cause” (McManus 2020, 334). Rather than people who have lost their moorings, the subjects of our research are deeply anchored in families and communities, and it was the political context they found themselves in that became central to their decisions to engage in violent extremism.

Extremist violence emerges in systems of political conflict

Young people with their developmental changes and identity crises are seen as particularly liable to youthful irrationality and are not often depicted as rational actors located in a political context. Furthermore, radicalisation is seen as belonging to the individual, and the role of the state as part of a conflictual system and a cause of radicalisation is often ignored. Yet, as Bigo and Guittet assert, “radicalisation never emerged in a political and socio-economic vacuum … it is never the outcome of the activities of one group or another. Radicalisation is a relationship process” (Bigo and Guittet 2011, 489). Similarly, Pettinger draws lessons from historical literature on terrorism that differ from the “individualised and pathologized conclusions of contemporary radicalization literature, by pointing to political environment” (Pettinger 2020, 227). Our interviews show the importance of this insight, whatever the age of people involved in acts of violent extremism. Experiences of conflict, the impact of legacies of the past and ongoing sectarianism are seen to be at the heart of radicalisation in both case studies.

Each of the Irish interviewees stressed the history of discrimination and then the intensification of “the Troubles” and the response of the Unionist government and then the British state and army as intrinsic to their decision to engage in violence. One interviewee remembered his earlier acceptance of the political status quo until “everything changed” during the events of 1968, when he saw “loyalists and police burning down our houses” leaving him feeling like “a second-class citizen” (RoI3). Comparable experiences of being displaced were mentioned by one of the Bosnian interviewees whose family became refugees within Yugoslavia during World War Two and who then felt empathy for Syrian Muslims who were displaced by the Assad regime (BH3).

In Bosnia, the legacies of war shaped the context in which our older interviewees, some of whom served in the military, others who were disabled during the war, opted for violence. In the words of BH3,

I was defending BiH for 44 months … [then] … I watched rapes, killing Muslims, Abu Ghraib … and that prompted me […]. It was due to islamophobia, they just needed to condemn us. I wanted to show solidarity with people, refugees; the Assad regime did bad things to Muslims there. In Syria, 15% of people lived in abundance (Alawites) and others were on the verge of poverty. (BH3)

This finds echoes in the thoughts of BH1:

It is stupid if someone thinks that someone just comes to the mosque and says, “let’s go to Syria”. It doesn’t go that way, it’s much deeper. Other things affected me as well - I saw shelling and killing of Muslims and that triggered me [through the media]. I am going to defend my own - it is a duty of Muslims […]. (BH1)

In this context, the Bosnian genocide could become a “metanarrative” used by Al Qaeda and IS in recruiting fighters (McManus 2020, 336) by drawing parallels to violence against Muslims in the international interventions of the 2000s and the Syrian civil war.

All our interviewees drew direct attention to the political context in which people (of varying ages) came to see violence as a justified means to a political end. As the experiences related by our interviewees reveal, violent acts need to be seen in the context of local and international events, past and present, and the relationships seen between state and society. In Cathal McManus’s interesting formulation, we should not talk about “radicalisation” at all in such contexts, but rather talk about the “sectarianization” of societies which provoke anger and “othering”, creating grounds for violence (McManus 2020). In the Northern Irish context, it was state repression of the non-violent Civil Rights Movement that highlighted “the crucial role that the state can play in fostering or mitigating the development of cumulative extremism” (Carter 2016, 40). As RoI3 expressed further his experience of that time,

But 1969 changed all of that. I saw loyalists and police burning down our houses, I saw loyalists dancing on the Falls Road and acting like animals against us. We had a huge group of loyalists and a huge group on nationalists fighting each other. You would think that the police would be in the middle keeping them apart, the police were with the loyalists attacking nationalists. (RoI3)

RoI3’s political rationale for his engagement was reiterated in the experiences of other interviewees:

When the conflict in Northern Ireland blew up, I was determined to play my part and attended demonstrations and protests against the treatment of Catholics in Northern Ireland by the British state and their protestant puppets. (RoI1)

The IRA’s war was not only a just and moral struggle, there was no alternative because the British Empire created the climate where there was no alternative means possible of achieving equality and [there was] enduring discrimination and brutalisation against Irish nationalists in the North. (RoI4)

Similarly, for BH1 becoming a foreign fighter was not related to youthful vulnerability or a rapid individualised radicalisation, but a response to political events and political aspirations:

It was not a youthful whim. I would like to live in a Muslim state. The logic is simple: You sow terror - you get terror. Western countries (e.g., France) bomb some countries and sow terror, but when they get terror, it is revenge and [to be] expected. (BH1)

Another participant commented on his perceptions of political double standards and discrimination,

When Palestinians are terrorised then it is not terrorism, or Rohingya Muslims, and when ISIL proclaimed itself then it is terrorism. I do not give my faith - but ideological aggression is being exerted on me as a believer. (BH6)

For our interviewees, the unresolved legacies of the past and contemporary political fault lines make it explicable why some of their generation and some younger people are still prepared to use violence. In the Northern Irish context, our interviewees offered analysis of what they see as ongoing neo-colonialism by the British and the consequences of Brexit:

Dissidents can point to the continued occupation of the 6 counties, the rhetoric of the loyalists and unionists that hasn’t changed since 1968–9, and they say that things haven’t changed at all. They think that the peace process has legitimised British rule in Ireland and the unionists are still in charge, and we in the mainstream republican movement are sell-outs. (RoI4)

The Legacy issues are also really important here. The British government is propped up by Unionism and don’t want to put their hands up and tell the truth about what they did here during the conflict, and still do today… When people don’t see justice for the past and hope for the future they turn to despair. The Unionists and the British still cling to the mind-set of colonialism and privilege, they think they have the right to trample on the rights and lives of others. (RoI2)

Brexit is a godsend for dissident republicans. Brexit will mean that the border will need staff to man it, and police to protect that staff. Not only will that give dissident groups as easy target, they will be able to point and say “look, nothing really changed; we have British Army on the border”. (RoI3)

Living in a society still marked by sectarianism is also radicalising. In an anecdote recounted by RoI3, the impact of living in the continuing structural violence of a divided society on a young person experiencing the intergenerational continuance of the conflict is conveyed:

Sectarianism is still rampant in some areas of the six counties … I saw it with my sister’s eldest son… This lad wasn’t republican at all, he was all about sports and just getting on with it. When he started in the new job [in 2017], he got lots of remarks about being catholic, about being from our area which is strongly republican. Now when I see him, he is more bitter, he talks about this being our country and who do these people think they are. If conflict started tomorrow, I know he would be in it. They radicalised him, all those remarks and derogatory comments everyday radicalised him, he changed from being a happy kid and now he’s more politically aware, and angry. Discrimination and prejudice sends people to the extremes. (RoI3)

This dynamic is of similar concern in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the post-war political and educational systems rely on the preservation of ethnic politics and cultures to the detriment of building social cohesion. As Halilovic-Pastuovic (2022) argues, countries such as Bosnia, where political parties are based on ethnic interest, and where state institutions are segmented by ethnic imperative, often fall into an ethnocracy trap where it is impossible to move past ethnic divisions. Contemporary Bosnian politics, mirroring the divides created by the war and reinforced by the ethnically based power-sharing peace settlement, mean that views often termed extreme (ethno-nationalist, right-wing, or religious) are often considered mainstream or socially acceptable in communities (Halilovic-Pastuovic, Hulzer, and Wylie 2023; Oruc and Obradovic 2020, 2560). In effect, as BH1 underlined, radical violence was “not a youthful whim” but an act of political agency in a conflictual context.

Conclusion and implications for P/CVE: going beyond ageist assumptions

Our data and analysis draw attention to the often-ignored presence of older men in violent extremist movements. From their own testimonies, it becomes clear that their extremist acts must be understood in the wider context of interrelationships between families and generations and the relationship of state to society. While highlighting these points from their interviews, it is important to acknowledge that their stories often contained further factors and complications. As Orla Lynch writes, “there is no silver bullet” in explaining why individuals engage with terrorism (Lynch 2017, 81). Her point is reiterated by one Bosnian interviewee who said, “there is no pattern, everyone went for own reasons, it would be stupid for me to say the reason for everyone” (BH1). In identifying their “own reasons”, our interviewees made statements that would chime with several other of the multiple drivers at the micro, meso and macro levels listed at the outset of this article. Some expressed strong ideological or religious motivations, such as RoI1 and RoI2 who were drawn to left-wing revolutionary socialism and BH1 who located “the source of all I am doings is (the) Quran”. RoI2 thought contemporary republican dissidents were drawn in by the desire for status and power which they believed engagement in extremism could give, whereas RoI3 critiqued them as driven by intra-group violence and old feuding. Given these complex profiles and the involvement of people of differing ages, across generations, the question of what constitutes effective and nuanced P/CVE policies resurfaces.

There is no doubt that violent extremism is a “wicked problem”, meaning that “attempts to resolve such problems may have unintended consequences that make the problem worse” (Schirch 2018, 57). From both contexts, for example, critiques of the impact of highly securitised responses to countering violent extremism emerged in the views of interviewees. “Raiding homes” by security forces was, for example, seen as inherently undermining PVE. As RoI3 said:

They will go and raid 5 or 6 homes just because one member of the family is involved. This alienates people and they stand by their people. It’s really counterproductive because it extends into families and makes people more likely to take an anti-police attitude. It’s really hard to make change when the police make such obvious blunders, or deliberate harassment and families then become hostile. (RoI3)

An echo of these words also came from a Bosnian interviewee:

This is Bosnia – “repressive measures” against returnees from foreign battlefields (US Embassy, Grand Mufti, parties SDA, SBB…) They can only make some people problematic people this way. They’re sending armed men in the houses; they can only provoke a counter-reaction. (BH1)

Other types of P/CVE actions (through educational, social work or political measures, for example) tend to target youth, based on theories that they are emotional, hormonal and unmoored from their families and communities, and therefore vulnerable to radicalisation. Organisations involved in P/CVE have “long supported the notion that young men fuel the rise of extremist groups” (Ezekilov 2017, 3), so many P/CVE activities focus on families and schools (Puigvert et al. 2020, 3). For example, in Nigeria, women’s civil society organisations focus on sympathisers of Boko Haram, who are primarily identified as “disaffected and unemployed youths” (Nwangwu and Ezeibe 2019). From the country case studies in Brown’s book, she suggests that the current focus on young Muslim men as problematic and young Muslim women as naïve victims of grooming is legitimating paternalistic state responses and anti-radicalisation initiatives that cast “father figures” as mentors for vulnerable youth (E. Brown 2020, 148). All of which pathologise normal changes in young people (Lynch 2013, 243) and create communities under suspicion. This form of P/CVE focuses on “psychology, identity and ideology of extremists”, rather than “analysing legitimate underlying grievances” (Sukarieh and Tannock 2018). This is a pattern also noted by Heath-Kelly et al., who see radicalisation interventions designed around the “silencing (of) politically inconvenient factors such as poverty, exclusion and foreign policy” (Heath-Kelly, Baker-Beall, and Jarvis 2015), or indeed the need for attention to the “crucial role the state plays in shaping “the development of extremism” (Carter 2016, 47; see also Beaujouan et al. 2023).

Our data and analysis have shown that radicalisation is not solely a phenomenon of youth. Older people are involved, and their radicalisation is driven by political situations and generational linkages in sectarian contexts. And even if now their violence is in the past (as is the case with our interviewees), their past involvement in violence “is an embedded part of their today and tomorrow” (Pettinger 2021, 506), shaping their ongoing lived experiences but largely neglected by P/CVE. The experiences reported and reflected on in this article therefore add to the critical engagement with current “paternalistic” responses to P/CVE. In the first instance, the profile of the interviewees suggests an exclusive obsession with youth is short-sighted. The views of the interviewees about why they engaged in violent extremism – whether they began as young people, got involved when they were older or remained engaged across their life-course – indicate the importance of moving away from psychological and individualistic drivers. Instead, it is essential to create interventions based on theories of change that understand intergenerational cohesion, grievances in ethno-sectarianised contexts and political interrelationships between states and communities. As Mani Crone reminds us, violent extremism in post-conflict contexts should be understood as a “process of politicization” (Crone 2016, 588) requiring political solutions.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express our great appreciation to our research assistants in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Ireland Elvir Duliman, Ana Marija Knezevic, Vernes Voloder and Dr Brendan Marsh.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 under Grant Agreement ID: 740773. PERICLES: Policy recommendation and improved communication tools for law enforcement and security agencies preventing violent radicalisation (2017–2020).

Notes on contributors

Maja Halilovic Pastuovic

Maja Halilovic Pastuovic is an Assistant Research Professor in the School of Religion, Theology, and Peace Studies in Trinity College Dublin and radicalisation expert for the Western Balkans as part of Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN). She is coordinator of GEMS: Games as a Multi-layered Security Threat project. GEMS is an interdisciplinary project which aims to significantly contribute to the fight against the rapid spread of extremism across the gaming ecosystem. Prior to that, Maja was a partner and WP lead on PAVE: Preventing and Addressing Violent Extremism through Community Resilience in the Western Balkans and the MENA and a partner in PERICLES: Policy recommendation and improved communication tools for law enforcement and security agencies preventing violent radicalisation. Maja was also principal investigator on GATED: Segregated education in post-conflict Bosnia and the possibilities of future conflicts in Europe on a MSCA Global Fellowship where she spent 2 years at Sie Centre for International Security and Diplomacy at the University of Denver. Maja is a sociologist and teaches in the areas of peace and conflict, radicalisation and violent extremism and identity, ethnicity and ethnopolitics. https://www.linkedin.com/in/maja-halilovic-pastuovic-0ab193124/.

Gillian Wylie

Gillian Wylie is an Associate Professor in International Peace Studies in Trinity College Dublin, with research interests in two distinct and inter-related areas – human trafficking and the gendering of violence and peace. She is author of The International Politics of Human Trafficking (Palgrave 2016) and the co-editor of Prostitution, Feminism and the State: The Politics of Neo-Abolitionism (Routledge 2017) and has published in The Journal of Human Trafficking, Ethnic and Migration Studies and European Journal of Women’s Studies. Gillian has undertaken the role of gender advisor to three European Commission funded projects on violent extremism and resilience to it – PERICLES (2017-20), PAVE (2019-2023) and GEMS (23-26). https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillian-wylie-31736034/.

Notes

1. The nomenclature is complicated in this context. The interviewees were from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland/the north of Ireland. The violence they perpetrated took place in NI and the UK. As they are now settled in the Republic of Ireland and the interviews all took place in Dublin, we code them as (RoI) and use Ireland/Irish when discussing their current positioning.

2. The Ireland/Northern Ireland interviewees began their involvement in violence before the concept of violent extremism became the overarching discourse. As IRA members, they would have been labelled “terrorists” rather than “violent extremists”. However, as noted by Martini, Ford, and Jackson (2020) “The term extremism has thoroughly permeated counter-terrorism discourses and policies” and we adopt it in light of this hegemonic discourse.

3. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/740773.