Understanding and Responding to Violent Extremism

This textbook helps students analyse the causes of violent extremism using different disciplinary approaches, and suggests concrete solutions from those perspectives.

Why do individuals join violent extremist movements? This book approaches that question through seven disciplinary lenses: security, ideology, sociology, socio-economics, psychology, gender, and youth. Rather than privileging one explanation, it shows how these perspectives complement each other and why effective responses depend on combining them. The book is built on a simple premise: you cannot respond to violent extremism without first understanding what drives it. Each chapter maps the push and pull factors behind radicalisation and traces their implications for prevention, intervention, and rehabilitation. To show the frameworks at work on real lives, the book includes profiles of six individuals who became involved in extremist movements. Each chapter is structured to guide students through the material step by step, combining conceptual frameworks with case studies, real-world profiles, and discussion questions that push beyond comprehension into genuine debate. Written for students who want to think seriously about one of the most pressing security challenges of our time, this book offers both analytical depth and practical tools.

The book will be of great interest to students of political violence, sociology, psychology, criminology, International Relations and public policy, as well as to practitioners working in counter-terrorism, preventing violent extremism, and the security sector.

Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh is Professor at Sciences Po Paris and Visiting Professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID), Switzerland, and at IE Spain. She is the author or editor of several books, including Human Security: Concepts and Implications (with Anuradha Chenoy, 2007), Rethinking the Liberal Peace (editor, 2011), and A Rock Between Hard Places: Afghanistan in its Regional Security Complexes (with Kristian P. Harpviken, 2016).