Extremism is a notion, which becomes meaningful in democratic and lawful societies. This is sometimes interchangeable with the terms, Fundamentalism and terrorism. It is often said that one who aims to fight against terrorism, must first challenge and overcome extremism. Thus, Analysis of the potentials of extremism in a society is highly articulated. Whereas Fundamentalism intends to bring abo...

This paper views Islamist radicals as self-interested political revolutionaries and builds on a general model of political extremism developed in a previous paper (Ferrero, 2002), where extremism is modelled as a production factor whose effect on expected revenue is initially positive and then turns negative, and whose level is optimally chosen by a revolutionary organization. The organization ...

The flavor du jour in discussions of Islamic terrorism features a de-emphasis on the ideological component, drawing instead upon epidemiological and criminological concepts; approaching Mexican drug gangs and Islamic extremists as being more similar than they are different. This aids a network scrutiny and suggests buy-out rather than ideological deradicalization. Such new abandonments of the i...

This paper will focus on the geopolitical interpretation of religion in international relations. This dimension has historically related religion to politics and politics among nations. More specifically we will analyze the use of religion as a legitimating instrument of political violence, with special focus on the violence emanating from Islamic extremism and terrorism. History of humanity is...

Global recruitment into radical Islamic movements has spurred renewed interest in the appeal of political extremism. Is the appeal a rational response to material conditions or is it the expression of psychological and personality disorders associated with aggressive behavior, intolerance, conspiratorial imagination, and paranoia? Empirical answers using surveys have been limited by lack of acc...

Observers of contemporary politics know that Islamic extremism presents ‘the West’ with a serious challenge of national and international security consequent to terrorist events of recent time. In addition to constabulary and military responses, there remains the more fundamental question about how to understand Islamist ideology and how counternarratives might be framed in the interest of law ...

Abstract In the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the ensuing dominance of political Islam discourse and its impact on Pakistani society, the ground was prepared for the spread of Wahhabism and anti-Shiism in that country due to the failure of the Islamabad government to manage the reactive conduct of extremist Salafist groups as well as its engagement in internal dis...