The Social and Political Psychology of Violent Radicalism (Peace Psychology Book Series) 303146253X, 9783031462535

Table of contents :
Introduction: Facing the Truth
What Comes Next?
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Authors
Part I: Theory: Intergroup Conflicts and Political Violence
Chapter 1: The Terrorist’s Motivation: The Psychology of Religious Extremism
The 3-N Model of Radicalization: The Quest for Significance
Terror Management Theory
Chapter 2: Theories of Intergroup Relations: Vicious Cycles Between “Us” and “Them”
The Social Identity Perspective
A New Understanding of Social Groups
Relative Deprivation Theory: Grievances and Collective Action
Theoretical and Methodological Problems in the Study of Relative Deprivation
Chapter 3: Politics and Domestic Terrorism: Building a Diverse Democracy
Muslim-Western Relations Across 15 Countries
National Models of Integration
Part II: Research: The Stairway to Radicalization and the Collective Response to Terrorism
Chapter 4: Political Violence as a Last Resort: The Role of Group-Based Relative Deprivation
When and Why Are Muslims Likely to Support Political Violence?
The French Secularism Policy and Islamist Radicalism
Chapter 5: Paris 2015: The Psychological Effects of Terrorist Attacks
The Conservative Shift Hypothesis
Establishing the Causal Impact of the Charlie Hebdo Attacks
The Effects of the Terrorist Attacks on Discrimination Against Muslims
Chapter 6: “I Am Charlie”: How Four Million People Stood Up against Terrorism
Prejudice, Intergroup Bias, and the Charlie Hebdo Attacks
January 11, 2015: Who Were the Marchers?
Part III: Conclusion: Policy Implications
Chapter 7: Blueprint for a Long-Term Goal: Prevention of Political Violence
Deradicalization Programs
The Primary Prevention of Political Violence: Developing an Effective National Policy
What Should Be Done to Implement an Effective Policy?
References
Index

Citation preview

Peace Psychology Book Series Series Editor: Daniel J. Christie

Serge Guimond Armelle Nugier

The Social and Political Psychology of Violent Radicalism

Peace Psychology Book Series Series Editor Daniel J. Christie, Marion, OH, USA

Series Advisory Board Herbert Blumberg, Goldsmiths College, United Kingdom Daniel Bar-Tal, Tel Aviv University, Israel Klaus Boehnke, International University Bremen, Germany Peter Coleman, Columbia University, USA Cheryl de la Rey, University of Cape Town, South Africa Shelley McKeown Jones, University of Bristol, United Kingdom Yayah Khisbiyah, Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta, Indonesia Siew Fang Law, Victoria University, Australia Wilson Lopez Lopez, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia Winnifred Louis, University of Queensland, Australia Anthony Marsella, University of Hawaii, USA Fathali Moghaddam, Georgetown University, USA Maritza Montero, Central University of Venezuela, Venezuela Cristina Montiel, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines Ann Sanson, University of Melbourne, Australia Mohamed Seedat, University of South Africa Michael Wessells, Columbia University and Randolph-Macon College, USA

The scope of threats to human security at the dawn of the 21st century is daunting. Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear proliferation, failed states, ideological struggles, growing resource scarcities, disparities in wealth and health, globalizing trends, violations of human rights, and the continued use of force to advance individual, group and national interests, are all complex problems. At the same time, we are witnessing countervailing trends in the growing recognition and endorsement of nonviolent means of resolving differences, the importance of reconciliation processes in human relations, the promotion of cultures of peace, and the building of societal structures and global institutions that promote peace, human rights and environmental sustainability. During the past 20 years, peace psychology has emerged as a specialty in psychology with its own knowledge base, perspectives, concepts, and preferred methodologies to grapple with threats to human security and seize opportunities to promote human well-being. In regard to the problem of violence, peace psychology scholars and activists place human psychology and its links to other disciplines at the center of their efforts to prevent and mitigate episodes of violence and structural forms of violence. In addition to reducing violence, peace psychologists seek to develop theory and practices that promote relational harmony across levels (from interpersonal relations to global networks) and equitable human well-being. The Peace Psychology Book Series recognizes that the emerging and multi-faceted problems of human security challenge us as scholars and activists to develop psychologically-informed theory that will deepen our understanding of the major threats to human security, and create practices that will help us address some of the most urgent and profound issues that bear on human well being and survival in the 21st century.

Serge Guimond • Armelle Nugier

The Social and Political Psychology of Violent Radicalism

Serge Guimond LAPSCO-UMR6024 CNRS University of Clermont Auvergne Clermont-Ferrand, France

Armelle Nugier LAPSCO-UMR6024 CNRS University of Clermont Auvergne Clermont-Ferrand, France

ISSN 2197-5779     ISSN 2197-5787 (electronic) Peace Psychology Book Series ISBN 978-3-031-46253-5    ISBN 978-3-031-46254-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46254-2 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Introduction: Facing the Truth

This book presents a review of theory and research on the social and political psychology of radicalization and terrorism. It brings together important theoretical insights emerging from recent studies conducted in Western countries and outlines their policy implications. Since 9/11, Jihadi-inspired terrorist attacks have struck numerous capital cities in Europe and North America (for the actual number of attacks and associated casualties, see https://www.start.umd.edu/research-­projects/ global-­terrorism-­database-­gtd). These dramatic events raised two major questions: how can individual human beings perpetrate such barbaric actions and what can be done to prevent such radicalization and unbounded violence? This book provides a unique perspective on these issues by a detailed study of the social and political psychology of violent radicalism, relying on the upsurge in scientific publications on the topic that has occurred over the last 20 years (Atran, 2021; Koomen and Van Der Plight, 2016; Kruglanski et al., 2019). It offers a deeper analysis of the psychological aspects of terrorism than previous research by focusing not only on the terrorists themselves but also on understanding the reactions of the general population who is confronted with such lethal acts. The word “terrorism” is not ideal for a scientific analysis, loaded as it is with strong stereotypic perceptions (Sageman 2017). It is useful to consider terrorism as part of what we will call political violence: using violent means or the threat of violence to reach certain political ends. Although our focus will be on Islamist radicalism, we will draw on research concerning other types of movements, and the general theoretical rules that will be developed are expected to be valid for political violence coming from the radical right as well as from the radical left. In contrast to transnational terrorism, we will be primarily interested in radicalization leading to homegrown terrorism in Western democratic countries (King and Taylor, 2010). The concept of radicalization is defined by Khosrokhavar (2014) as “the process leading an individual or a group to endorse a violent form of action, directly related to an extremist ideology of a political, social or religious nature” (p. 7). Terrorism can be seen as “the ultimate endpoint of radicalization” (van den Bos 2020, p. 565).

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Distinguishing Between Different Radical Groups  Examining concrete cases of political violence can be useful to set the stage for what will follow. These cases include, among others, what observers will refer to as riots, violent protests, revolutions, or terrorism (Webber et al., 2020). Following Doosje et al. (2016), it is possible to distinguish between five main types of radical groups that are involved in these various forms of political violence: 1. National movements of liberation (e.g., ETA in Spain, IRA in Ireland, FLQ in Québec, Canada); 2. Extreme right-wing groups (e.g., Ku Klux Klan in the USA); 3. Extreme left-wing groups (e.g., Red Army Faction in Germany, Red Brigade in Italy); 4. Single issue groups (e.g., groups focusing on a particular topic such as the environment, animal rights, or abortion such as the Animal Liberation Front); and 5. Religiously motivated groups (e.g., Al Qaida, ISIS). These various groups have played a more or less important role across different periods but they have all engaged in politically motivated violence. Numerous nationalist movements have turned to political violence in order to attain their goal: the achievement of political independence. For example, in the 1970s, the group called the FLQ, the Quebec Liberation Front, turned to terrorism in what was called in Canada the “October crisis.” The ultimate aim of this movement was to create in the province of Québec a state independent from the rest of Canada (Guimond and Dubé-Simard, 1983). In October 1970, the FLQ placed bombs in Montréal, kidnapped a minister that was later found dead, and generally engaged in various acts of terror. The federal government in Canada declared the “war measures act” to deal with what was seen as a major threat to national security. A year later in 1971, when this terrorist group was dismantled, the Canadian government presented a new policy called “multiculturalism” designed in part to deal with the Quebec separatist movement. This policy has become a major topic of research across the social sciences, and we will come back later on to discuss in more detail how such national integration policies can be a key factor in understanding the emergence and the prevention of political violence (see Chap. 3). Extreme right-wing groups is a second type of radical groups identified by Doosje et al. (2016). The action of these groups in the USA and Western Europe often take the form of physical attacks on racial, ethnic, or religious minorities (see Baddan and Jost, 2020). In the 1950s and 1960s, many White supremacists in the USA joined the Ku Klux Klan and conducted violent attacks against members of the Black community. One recent case of extreme-right violence occurred in the town of Charlottesville in Virginia on August 12, 2017. During a huge gathering of White supremacists and Klan members that attracted a crowd of antiracist opponents, violence erupted between the two groups resulting in one dead and several injured. The victim, a woman of 32 years old, was hit by a car driven by a young man of 20 years old, known to be associated with the extreme-right, who purposely drove into the crowd of antiracist opponents causing serious injuries to several of them. This type of extremely violent behavior, using a car to hit one’s opponent, was not observed among the antiracist group. Yet, the president of the USA at the time, Donald Trump, commented publicly on this incident stressing that there was violence on “both

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sides,” ostensibly trying to equate the actions of the white nationalists with those of the counter-protesters. This appeared totally out of line to many observers and journalists and revealed that Donald Trump had considerable difficulty in condemning extreme-right wing groups in the USA such as the Ku Klux Klan, despite their overtly racist stance. Of course, this does not mean that political violence only comes from the extreme right. It is clear that the extreme left is also able to do the same. In that sense, one can agree with the idea that political violence exists on both sides of the political spectrum. However, in the case of Charlottesville, the violent intentions and the violent behaviors were disproportionally coming from the White supremacists and Klan members. Recent evidence discussed in detail below suggests that this is the general rule: although there are radical groups on the left as well as on the right, the radical groups on the right are generally more likely to engage in acts of violence against other human beings than those from the radical left (Jasko et al., 2022). Nevertheless, across history, there are numerous instances of violence from the left-wing, from millions killed by communist leaders (Stalin, Mao) to more specific actions in modern times from radical groups in the USA or Western Europe (Courtois et  al. 1997). For example, on November 16, 1986, Georges Besse, the CEO of Renault, one of the leading car manufacturers in France, was killed by two women as he was returning to his home in Paris. The next day, a communist organization called “Action Directe” claimed responsibility for this action. From the perspective of this extreme left-wing group, actions against living symbols of “capitalist exploitation” were required. Many extreme left revolutionary groups that grew out of May ’68 and the opposition to the Vietnam War (such as the German Red Army Faction and the Italian Red Brigade) were without any doubt involved in violence and terrorism. But these groups have been short-lived. Sommier (2021) argues that present-­ day radical groups from the left are quite different from those of the past. They are less institutionalized and more likely to favor underground actions seeking to create chaos. Still, just as the Nazi ideology (i.e., National Socialism) can be seen behind acts of political violence by the radical right, some versions of a communist or Marxist ideology lie behind acts of political violence by the radical left. “Ghetto riots” occurring in the USA from the mid-sixties on, that can be somewhat related to the present-day movement of Black Lives Matter (BLM), could also be included as part of the violent actions of some left-wing people (for a review of early research, see McPhail, 1971). These types of urban revolt with ethnic or racial minorities burning cars and destroying public buildings also occurred in many other countries. In France, a major urban riot occurred in November 2005 and went on all over France for three weeks (see Kamiejski and Guimond, 2012). Another one more brutal and lasting 8 days occurred in July 2023. Research suggests that all of these more or less violent protests start in similar ways (Kamiejski et al., 2012). They are triggered by events related to police action that are experienced by the population as being fundamentally wrong and morally unjust. As was the case for the BLM movement or ghetto riots earlier, the event that started the riot in July 2023 in France is the fact that a 17-years-old Maghrebian man was shot and killed by the French police for refusing to stop his car. The police claimed that their lives and those of

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others were in danger when the young men started his car but a video of the scene posted on social media was showing that the policemen were on the side of the car so that they were not in any immediate danger. No firearms or weapons and no drugs were found in the car. Several days of protest and destruction ensued. Outside of the USA, the Oslo terrorist attack in Norway (July 2011) and the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand (March 2019) were both perplexing instances of mass violence motivated by an extreme-right ideology. In Norway, a 32-years-old male placed a bomb in Oslo and then engaged in a mass shooting at a summer camp on the island of Utoya. He killed 77 young people and injured 151 others. After being found psychologically able to stand trial, he was sentenced to the maximum criminal penalty of 21 years’ imprisonment. On the day of the attacks, the terrorist emailed a huge 1500-page document describing his ideology. According to the International Center for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), “The bulk of the document constitutes a compilation of texts mainly copied from US far-Right websites” (https://www.icct.nl/publication/anti-­islamist-­anders-­behring-­breiviks-­manifesto). He explained his hostility toward Islam, feminism, race-mixing, and multiculturalism. Convinced that within a few decades, all major cities would be demographically overwhelmed by Muslims, he justified his violence as a necessary “pre-emptive war.” During his trial, he explained that for him “Marxists” were legitimate target and that all those who led Norway on the path of multiculturalism and Islam were “traitors.” In his defense, he correctly noted that several powerful politicians in Europe, namely Sarkozy (France), Merkel (Germany), and Cameron (the UK), also believed that multiculturalism was a threat to national identity. However, Norway has a relatively low level of immigration, lower than France or the USA, and is not known for having a strong multiculturalism policy (Berry et al., 2006). Moreover, and contrary to the position of Sarkozy, Merkel, or Cameron, evidence from Canada, a country that has had a multiculturalism policy for more than 50 years, indicate that this policy does not weaken but strengthen national identity and pride in being Canadians (Guimond, 2019). In Christchurch, an Australian male of 28 years old is now serving a sentence of life imprisonment without parole for the murder of 51 people and the attempted murder of 40 people in two mosques in New Zealand. What may be upsetting is that this killer did explicitly indicate being influenced by the actions of the Oslo terrorist that occurred 8 years earlier in Norway. At the time of the attacks, the Australian killer also sent an email with a 74-page manifesto. His ideology shares much of the extreme-right vision espoused by the Oslo terrorist. The Australian killer refers to “the Great Replacement” theory, an elaborate conspiracy propagated by the French author Renaud Camus in 2011. Camus suggests that native inhabitants of Western European countries are being replaced by non-European people through immigration. With declining white birth rates, the fear is that the native (white) population is becoming a minority. Thus, Muslims are singled out as a threat. The uncomfortable truth is that, as for the Oslo terrorist, this conspirational narrative is now shared not only by White supremacists in the USA but also by many heads of Western European government and national media outlets (see Baele 2019). Similar to Fox news in the USA, the television channel called CNEWS in France is giving credence to the

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great replacement theory practically every day. Although the content will differ widely, conspiracy narratives are considered as important to understand both violent right-wing extremism and violent left-wing extremism (Frennet and Joost, 2021). Doosje et al. (2016) suggested that so-called single issue groups can be considered as a fourth type of radical groups. Considering problems such as global warming or animal exploitation, it is clear that important protest movements, sometimes using radical tactics, have been active in recent times in order to attract attention to these issues. This category can be expected to become of increasing importance in the coming years. As the problems related to global warming become more acute, and governments fail in taking the measures needed, a growing number of people are likely to consider that radical changes are necessary. Finally, the last category of radical groups identified by Doosje et al. (2016), not the least, is religiously motivated groups. This is the group that has attracted the most attention in recent times and a large share of the upsurge of research on radicalism deals with Islamist terrorism. This is not a random choice. Terrorism directed, inspired, and approved by some version of radical Islam has been considered for several years as the main threat to Western security and interests. Hard data supports these perceptions. As Huet et  al. (2019) noted using data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (START) from the University of Maryland (http://www.start.umd.edu/), after 9/11 2001, and up to 2010, we have seen in the USA a sharp decrease in the proportion of terrorist attacks carried out by left-wing or environmental extremists and a sharp increase of those carried out by religious extremists, namely Jihadi-inspired groups. Moreover, “Worldwide, and for the year 2017 alone, the data indicate that ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) was the top perpetrator group with 1321 attacks followed by the Taliban with 907 attacks” (Huet et al. 2019, p. 2). Going beyond the sheer number of terrorist attacks, Jasko et  al. (2022) have addressed the question of whether there are systematic differences in the amount of violence displayed by right-wing extremists, left-wing extremists, and religious extremists. In a first study using data from individuals radicalized within the USA only, between 1948 and 2018, they found that those most likely to commit acts of violence (i.e., conspiring to kill or injure) were first, those supporting Islamist ideology, followed by groups supporting a right-wing ideology who were non-­ significantly lower, and followed by the left-wing groups who were significantly less violent than the other two groups. In Study 2, using a worldwide terrorism database covering the years 1970 to 2017, and the number of people killed as a measure of violence, they obtained similar results. Islamist attacks resulted in greater fatalities and attacks by left-wing extremists resulted in much lower fatalities, with right-wing extremists being in the middle. In sum, both in terms of frequency and in terms of severity, the available evidence suggests that of the five types of radical groups that we have distinguished, the fifth one, religiously motivated groups, is the most important one with regard to political violence. Of course, more research by various groups of researchers is needed to confirm these findings. For the moment, we can note that Webber et al.

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(2020), in reviewing research on ideologies that justify violence, were pretty much predicting what Jasko et al. (2022) later found. Webber et al. (2020) noted that “two candidate ideologies” are likely to be effective in justifying violence: “ideologies on the political right (versus left) and religious (versus secular) ideologies” (p. 109). Nevertheless, we do not want to place too much emphasis on these findings because a given ideology can be supported by millions of people, most of whom will never engage in political violence. What we do want to point out is that we will be especially interested in the pages that follow in understanding and explaining political violence from religiously motivated groups. Explaining Political Violence  In order to understand political violence, the distinction that will be emerged in our analysis as a key one is that between activism, defined as support for normative non-violent collective action, and radicalism, defined as support for non-normative and violent collective action (Martin et  al., 1984; Moskalenko and McCauley, 2009; Wright et al., 1990). As such, we want to point out the obvious, right from the start, as this will be important later on: as a rule, political violence is not an accepted democratic mean of doing politics. It is generally defined as being outside of the normal democratic process. Taking a long-­ term historical perspective, spanning several centuries, we see that war, violence, and aggression have been decreasing substantially over time as the influential book of Steven Pinker (2012) has argued. In his earlier “Histoire de la violence,” Chesnais (1981) paints a similar picture, involving the paradox between our subjective sense that violence is now everywhere when in reality, the brutality of life in ancient times, without any rules, constitutions, or elected governing bodies, far exceed anything that we can even imagine. The advent of the democratic process in politics can be seen as one of the factors involved in the reduction of political violence. As we will show in this book, political violence is more likely to occur when people believe that democratic means are no longer working. For example, as noted above, the group called the FLQ, the Quebec Liberation Front, turned to terrorism in the 1970s. One of the main leaders of this terrorist movement, Paul Rose, was interviewed while in prison about the reasons for these actions. Paul Rose said: “I must say that at the time, the democratic means [of protest] were not working….” Paul Rose then gives details on several types of peaceful actions that were no longer possible, because of the actions of the police, leading to the idea that there was no other option than to become more radicals and to turn to political violence. This is one of the major themes that we will develop in order to explain the contemporary radicalization of young Muslims in the West. We will provide evidence of the ways in which the political means of fighting against terrorism can have the paradoxical effect of increasing radicalization. Political violence does not emerge in a vacuum. Knowledge about the beliefs, motives, and social networks of radicals and religious extremists is of the utmost importance (Kruglanski et al., 2019). However, to understand why people turn to political violence, as Sageman (2017) recently argued, there is a vital need to understand the relationships between the different groups involved, the Jihadi-inspired groups, and the non-terrorists, that is the general population and its elected

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representatives. To put it simply, extreme violence does not simply emerge, even when committed by a single individual, from the psychological predispositions of this individual but out of a conflict between the perpetrators and their opponents. As Kruglanski et al. (2013) noted on the basis of extensive research: “We know that a specific personality profile that characterizes a terrorist does not exist” (p.  560). Similarly, reviews of the evidence find little systematic relations between mental health problems, radicalization, and mass violence (Misiak et al., 2019). Yet, much work proceeds by looking only at the perpetrators (or those assumed to be likely perpetrators). Pondering on the results of classic laboratory experiments conducted in social psychology by Zimbardo or Milgram in the 1960s and 1970s, it is easy to understand that anybody can become a terrorist (see Reicher and Haslam, 2016). Zimbardo (1970) randomly assigned some bright and healthy university students to play the role of prison guards, or prisoners, in order to simulate prison life. Recent research has provided new interpretations of the work of Zimbardo that are at variance with his own account (see Le Texier, 2019; Reicher and Haslam, 2006). Nevertheless, the fact remains that Zimbardo did stop the experiment after several days because the prison guards were too aggressive, humiliating, and abusing. Taking their role of prison guards seriously, they were putting in danger the health of those who were playing the part of prisoners. Milgram (1974) found that the average American will inflict life-threatening electric shocks to another person, even when this person is apparently almost dead. In a series of 18 experiments, he showed that by making simple changes in the social context, the level of obedience to the (immoral) command of a scientific authority could range from 0% obedience (experiment 14) to 92.5% obedience (experiment 18). Similar results were obtained across cultures (see Guimond, 2010). Recently, Bègue and Vezirian (2022) studied the willingness of average people in France to harm animals in the name of science. In a modified Milgram paradigm simulating biomedical research on Alzheimer’s disease, the participants were required to administer 12 doses of toxic chemicals to a red fish swimming in a large glass container (the fish was actually a robot). The substance was said to be able to stimulate animal learning. However, it was pointed out that at high dosages, the drug could have adverse consequences on vital functions of the animal. The results showed that over 50% of the participants fully completed the task and those randomly assigned to a pro-science condition were more likely to do so than those assigned to an anti-science condition. Thus, violence can be perpetrated under the name of science as well as under the name of God or when shouting Allah Akbar. The point is not that we should introduce some sorts of relativism between various types of violent actions. Rather, it is simply to draw attention to a simple but difficult fact: good people can do evil things. The Tsarnaev brothers, shown in video footage as being the authors of the Boston marathon bombing in 2013, were described by their college friends as “very funny, very sweet, very sociable” or as “talented, respectful,” in short as people who would never hurt anybody (Chappell, 2013). Average ordinary citizens that do not suffer from deep-seated personality defects are able to engage in violent and destructive behaviors. Why? To arrive at a valid answer, these facts suggest that we need to have a better psychological

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understanding of ourselves. We need to begin to consider how our own reactions can sometimes increase, and at other times, decrease the potential for political violence. Consequently, the pages that follow will provide up-to-date information not only about the terrorists themselves but also about us, the opponents of terrorism. This book is not an attempt at providing justifications for the use of political violence, although it may be construed as such by some readers. We are scientists interested in scientific understanding. As Fiske (2013) pointed out: “Make no mistake: Understanding is not condoning” (p.  605). Although the general public, including ourselves in our day-to-day life, prefer to blame other humans for terrible events, as scientists, we are inviting readers to go beyond these first impressions and to take into account empirical observations emerging from sophisticated research procedures that we cannot use in our daily life. Indeed, in 2001, we had very little scientific knowledge about when and why indiscriminate terrorist attacks could occur. Since then, researchers all over the world did a lot of work and published an enormous amount of data that are shedding lights on these events. We now know more than ever before because we are at a period in history when, not only we did experience a large sampling of killings for political-religious purposes, but we also have many scientific tools that were not available before. Nevertheless, getting the observations is only a part of the scientific work. And the more observations we have, the greater the importance of engaging in the other important part of science: making sense of these data and integrating them in a coherent framework that allows us to reach a better understanding. This is the main goal of the present opus.

What Comes Next? This book is divided into three parts. Part I introduces the most relevant theories, the scientific tools that enable the integration of scientific knowledge. Part II examines new empirical evidence, and Part III discusses policy implications, with the prevention of political violence as a long-term goal. In Part I, we first review previous scholarly work on terrorism and religious extremism that provides an in-depth treatment of the motivational aspects such as Significance Quest Theory and Terror Management Theory (Chap. 1). We explain how this work can be integrated within theories of intergroup conflicts and specify in what ways this can lead to a better understanding of political violence (Chap. 2). To this end, we discuss the major theories of intergroup relations in social psychology (Realistic Conflict Theory; Social Identity/Self-categorization theories; Relative Deprivation Theory). Chap. 3 brings in major works in political psychology and develops new ideas about the role of political institutions and national policies in the explanation of political violence. Based on a detailed analysis of a major comparative study of Muslims and non-­ Muslims relations across Western countries conducted by Pew (2006), it is argued that national policies in democratic countries can create, sometimes inadvertently, a

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political context that will foster radicalization and political violence rather than prevent it. Part II examines recent empirical evidence on Muslim radicalism in France, home to the largest population of Muslims in Western Europe (Hackett, 2015). The reaction of the general population to actual Jihadi-inspired terrorist attacks that took away the lives of several human beings is also examined. The results confirm the claim that national policies play a role both in accounting for the radicalization of opposition groups (Chap. 4) and in explaining why under certain conditions Jihadi-­ inspired terrorist attacks, far from increasing authoritarianism and conservatism in the general population, can actually foster inclusive attitudes toward Muslims and other minorities (Chaps. 5 and 6). In Chap. 5, we first present evidence from a carefully controlled laboratory experiment conducted in France in the midst of the January 2015 terror attacks in Paris (see Nugier and Guimond, 2016). As is typical of Jihadi-inspired terrorism, these attacks involved extreme violence in several different locations around Paris at the same time (killings of unarmed civilians in the office of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo; attacks against a Jewish store; and so on). Including these real attacks in the design of a laboratory experiment, as a naturally occurring independent variable, allows one to test the causal effect of terrorism on a sub-sample of the French population. Across the thousands of research projects conducted on terrorism and political violence, there are very few known cases where causal inferences can be drawn with such a high level of confidence. It is shown that these terror attacks can increase hostile reactions toward the perpetrators and their religious leanings, but it is also shown when and why the opposite can occur: a significant decrease in hostile attitudes and behaviors toward Arab/Muslim targets. Understanding how people can resist becoming revengeful and avoid falling down the path of disunity is critical to the development of policy. The significance of these findings is then related in Chap. 6 to the results of other more conventional (correlational) studies conducted on these events and to a set of unique national surveys conducted on representative samples of the population of France immediately before the attack in December 2014 and 6 months after in July 2015 (see Lueders et al., 2023). It is well-known that laboratory experiments in social psychology are unique scientific tools to tease out the cause from the effect. However, with human participants, they can have limited generality. This is why it is crucial to use also modern survey techniques allowing to generalize from a sub-sample to a whole nation. Consistent with the experimental findings, there is evidence that the French population as a whole became, paradoxically, more positive toward Muslims, and other stigmatized social groups, between December 2014 and July 2015. These findings challenge existing research conducted in the USA, in Spain, or in the UK, all suggesting that people become more anti-immigrant and more anti-­ Muslim following a terrorist attack. They seem contrary to the well-known “politics of fear” thesis that suggests an inherent tendency for terrorist threats to shift attitudes in an authoritarian and conservative direction (Jost et  al., 2017). However, they are in line with a more contextual viewpoint (see Federico and Malka, 2018).

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Further evidence allowing to discuss the relevance of these different positions is presented in Chap. 6 in an analysis of the predictors of the participation in the collective action of January 11, 2015. The march of January 11, 2015, in France was a collective response to the terrorist attacks. It involved 4 million people, not only in Paris but also in all major French cities. This is the day that the saying “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) was born, and one of the reasons why these events attracted international attention (Iaccobucci and Toope 2015). According to historians, this was the largest collective gathering to ever occur in France (Weil et Truong 2015). Considerable debates exist over the nature of this collective movement and the political leanings of the people who were “Charlie.” Our conceptual work and empirical evidence converge to make sense of these events in a way that has not been achieved so far. In Part III, the concluding chapter of the book draws out the policy implication of these findings for the prevention of political violence. It reviews existing efforts often taking the form of “deradicalization programs.” It suggests an alternative and complementary approach of primary prevention based on the implementation of an appropriate national policy that can be effective in building a resilient society.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the staff at Springer Nature for their expert help in bringing this book to life, including Amrita Unnikrishnan, Amelie von Zumbusch, Paige Ripperger, and Sharon Panulla, the anonymous reviewers who worked at various stages of this project, and especially, Daniel Christie, the Peace Psychology Book Series Editor. Our most sincere appreciations go also to our colleagues and students, and our families and friends, who were there for us over the years (with special thanks to Juliette and Léon). Much of the research described here was facilitated by funding from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), France (grants ANR-18-ORAR-0003 and ANR 11-FRQU-004-01).

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Contents

Part I Theory: Intergroup Conflicts and Political Violence 1

The Terrorist’s Motivation: The Psychology of Religious Extremism������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 The 3-N Model of Radicalization: The Quest for Significance ����������������    3 Terror Management Theory ����������������������������������������������������������������������    7

2

Theories of Intergroup Relations: Vicious Cycles Between “Us” and “Them”����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   11 The Social Identity Perspective������������������������������������������������������������������   12 A New Understanding of Social Groups����������������������������������������������������   13 Relative Deprivation Theory: Grievances and Collective Action��������������   23 Theoretical and Methodological Problems in the Study of Relative Deprivation������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   28

3

 Politics and Domestic Terrorism: Building a Diverse Democracy������   31 Muslim-Western Relations Across 15 Countries ��������������������������������������   34 National Models of Integration������������������������������������������������������������������   38

Part II Research: The Stairway to Radicalization and the Collective Response to Terrorism 4

 Political Violence as a Last Resort: The Role of Group-Based Relative Deprivation ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   49 When and Why Are Muslims Likely to Support Political Violence?��������   49 The French Secularism Policy and Islamist Radicalism����������������������������   55

5

 Paris 2015: The Psychological Effects of Terrorist Attacks ����������������   67 The Conservative Shift Hypothesis������������������������������������������������������������   68 Establishing the Causal Impact of the Charlie Hebdo Attacks������������������   70 The Effects of the Terrorist Attacks on Discrimination Against Muslims����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   75

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6

Contents

 Am Charlie”: How Four Million People Stood Up against “I Terrorism��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   79 Prejudice, Intergroup Bias, and the Charlie Hebdo Attacks����������������������   81 January 11, 2015: Who Were the Marchers? ��������������������������������������������   88

Part III Conclusion: Policy Implications 7

Blueprint for a Long-Term Goal: Prevention of Political Violence ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 Deradicalization Programs������������������������������������������������������������������������   94 The Primary Prevention of Political Violence: Developing an Effective National Policy������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   96 What Should Be Done to Implement an Effective Policy?������������������������  100

References ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  105 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  119

About the Authors

Serge  Guimond  is Emeritus Professor of Experimental Social Psychology at Université Clermont Auvergne (previously Université Blaise Pascal) in ClermontFerrand, France. He has studied social psychology in Montréal, Québec, Canada (McGill University and Université de Montréal) and in Paris, France (Université Paris Nanterre). He was Director of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) Laboratory of Social and Cognitive Psychology in Clermont-Ferrand (UMR 6024) from 2011 to 2015. Editor of Social Comparison and Social Psychology (Cambridge University Press), he is interested in psychology, culture, and politics. Armelle Nugier  is Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at Université Clermont Auvergne. She is head of the CNRS research team on “Social behaviors and collective dynamics” (with Céline Darnon) within the Laboratory of Social and Cognitive Psychology in Clermont-Ferrand. She has published numerous scientific articles and is the author of Les Influences Sociales (Dunod, second edition) with Peggy Chekroun.

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Part I

Theory: Intergroup Conflicts and Political Violence

Chapter 1

The Terrorist’s Motivation: The Psychology of Religious Extremism

Even on the highest throne in the world, one is always sitting on one’s ass Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Les Essais.

In 1939, Dollard and colleagues proposed the frustration-aggression hypothesis stating that “Aggression is always a consequence of frustration” (p. 1). This was an incredible attempt at explaining all forms of human aggression with a few basic principles. We now know that this hypothesis is not acceptable. For example, aggressive behavior can occur as a result of social learning when no frustration exists: people can simply imitate the behavior of an aggressive model and act aggressively themselves (Bandura, 1973). Nevertheless, this work was useful to start thinking about the complexities of the issues. As we will see in the next chapter, there is work suggesting that some form of frustration called “relative deprivation” is among the most important factors explaining the behavior of present-day terrorists (Guimond et al., 2023). We will provide new evidence in Chap. 4 directly testing this hypothesis among Muslims and non-Muslims in France. Before that, we need to look at one of the most accomplished theories of violent extremism that has been developed in social psychology over the last decade, the Significance Quest Theory (Kruglanski et al., 2019, 2022).

The 3-N Model of Radicalization: The Quest for Significance The 3-N model is one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive explanations of radicalism to have been developed in social psychology to account specifically for contemporary violent Islamist extremism (see Kruglanski et al., 2013, 2019, 2022). By incorporating Needs, Narratives and Networks—the 3-N—and showing how they relate to each other, the model allows for an improved understanding of all the © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Guimond, A. Nugier, The Social and Political Psychology of Violent Radicalism, Peace Psychology Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46254-2_1

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complexities involved in Jihadi-inspired terrorism. The starting point of the theory, the first N, is a motivational one that is completely missing in the frustration-­ aggression hypothesis: the need for significance. Engaging in terrorist activities are examples of goal-directed behaviors: the behavior is performed for a purpose, to reach a certain goal. Based on an extensive examination of previous motivational factors thought to underpin human involvement in terrorist activities, Kruglanski and colleagues argue that virtually all of them may be important because they impinge in one way or another on the need “to be somebody,” the need to matter, that is the need for personal significance. Moreover, a wide range of evidence is brought to bear by Kruglanski and colleagues to assess empirically the role of this motivation. These range from interviews with actual terrorists to laboratory experiment carefully establishing causal relations between the activation of the need for significance and behavior. Véronique Brocard (2020), a French journalist, not necessarily aware of the work done by Kruglanski and colleagues, has interviewed young people in prison in France on charges related to terrorism. She found that the only thing common among them is wanting to become somebody! Khosrokhavar (2015), a leading French sociologist and expert on the matter, could not agree more. He argued that for French jihadists, this period was the end of “insignificance.” With Jihad, they could become “somebody.” In their research, Kruglanski and colleagues have argued that both significance loss (and the threat of it) and opportunity for significance gains can activate the psychological need for significance and thus shape behavior. Experiences of failure, severe humiliations, or being the target of prejudice and discrimination are examples of the various conditions that may lead to what Kruglanski et al. (2013) call a “significance lost.” These experiences are thought to motivate individuals to regain significance. Content analysis of the propaganda tapes of terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda indicate the “use of group grievance, the suffering and humiliation of Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, or Palestine to enrage all Muslims [to] make them feel humiliated” (Kruglanski et al., 2013, p. 562, emphasis in original). Indeed, in the causal chain leading to violent behaviors, the loss of significance is thought to cause first a “collectivistic shift representing a transition from one’s individual identity to one’s social identity as the member of some group” (Kruglanski et al., 2019, p. 94). As we will see in the next chapter, this point directly relates to some of the central claims made in Social Identity/Self-categorization Theories (Turner and Reynolds, 2012). In a large number of studies, using correlational or experimental designs, and conducted in the USA but also in various other countries (Pakistan, Indonesia, or Egypt), Kruglanski et al. (2019) find evidence for this “collectivistic shift.” People who report lower life success as well as those who are led to think about a personal failure or to experience a failure on an important experimental task were all found to become more collectivist and more likely to identify themselves with their nation or their religion. Importantly, although the quest for significance is assumed to be a universal motivation, the type of significance that people will pursue is assumed to be socially and culturally defined. Kruglanski et al. (2013) state: “That is exactly

The 3-N Model of Radicalization: The Quest for Significance

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what the significance quest represents: It is attainment of what the culture says is worth attaining, the kind of competence that the culture values, or control over outcomes that the culture deems worthy, and for which one is accorded the admiration of others who matter to oneself” (p. 561). This is where the other two components of the 3-N model, Narratives and Networks, become important and transform a theory of individual motivation into a genuine social psychology of violent extremism. As Ellenberg and Kruglanski (2023) clearly explained, the need for significance in and of itself is insufficient to explain violent extremism. It can lead to winning a Nobel prize as much as becoming a high-profile terrorist. It is the Narratives, usually called ideology, that define the means of gaining significance. In the case of terrorist groups, the narrative will identify not only how the world works but also who are the enemies and why it is justified to use violence against them. For example, killing innocent bystanders, as was observed typically in Jihadi-inspired terrorist attacks, can seem difficult to understand. However, if the narrative suggests that violence is the only means of destroying and replacing a corrupt system, and if it further defines everybody in this system as being accomplices who, by their action or inaction, maintains this system, then these accomplices become legitimate targets. The quest for significance as a motive seems to fit well with the actions of Chérif and Saïd Kouachi who, on January 7, 2015, were shouting Allahou Akbar and “the Prophet got its revenge” in the streets of Paris after shooting and killing the editorial committee of Charlie Hebdo and its cartoonists (for a description of these events, see Nugier and Guimond, 2016). It was as if they were proud of their actions and wanted to tell all their peers that “they” did it. Similarly, Amedy Coulibaly who was to play a role in the next sequence of this terrorist attack on January 9 did a video of himself to also take credit for these actions and suggesting that he was proud to pay allegiance to ISIS (Islamic State). The terrorist attack of January 2015 in Paris involved the killings of unarmed civilians in the name of a religion, Islam. It occurred after several major cities in the West were hit such as New York and Washington in 2001, Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, or Boston in 2013. There are both similarities and differences among these various acts of terrorism. On the morning of January 7, two heavily armed gunmen entered the building in Paris where the journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were in an editorial meeting. They were all killed in matter of minutes. Coming outside of the building, they shot and killed a policeman rushing down to the scene: Ahmed Merabet, a French policeman, Muslim of Algerian origin. The next day, a policewoman named Clarissa Jean-Philippe was killed by a man who, on January 9th enters the Hyper Casher grocery store (Porte de Vincennes, Paris), takes hostages and kills four more people. Everything ended on January 9 with all three terrorists being killed by the police. For simplicity, we will refer to these attacks collectively as the Paris attacks or the Charlie Hebdo attacks. At the time, nobody knew exactly when it would end. By their very nature, these acts communicate a sense that everything is possible. No one really knows who is going to be hit next. On January 11, people in Paris and all over France gathered together for a march of solidarity for the victims. This is what happened. This attack was officially

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sponsored by ISIS (Islamic State), and we now know that the three killers were all born in France. Thus, this was a case of domestic terrorism. Well before the Paris attacks, autonomous homegrown groups, responsible for 78% of terrorism plots in Western countries between 2003 and 2008, were considered as top threats to national security (King and Taylor, 2011). In Part II, we will present detailed evidence on the effects of these terrorist attacks on the French population, much of it challenging current understanding of terrorism. In terms of Narratives, it is clear that those immediately responsible for these attacks were exposed to all the elements that can justify taking such violent actions. According to Khosrokhavar (2015), the French jihadists were not devout Muslims but became so at some point under the influence of some spiritual leaders, their friends, the internet, and a trip in some key countries (Irak, Syria, Afghanistan, or Pakistan). Thus, their encounter with the Narratives or the ideology were clear and strong. Finally, Narratives become powerful tools when they are largely distributed within a population. The third and last pillars of radicalization, the Networks, play this essential role. It refers to face-to-face contact with friends and families but also, of course, to computer-mediated contact through social media. The Networks are useful to ensure that Narratives that are appealing to people’s significance quest can be not only widely distributed but also socially validated. When the members of your network all agree that “this is the thing to do,” you are likely to think the same way. Smith et al. (2019) argued that Daesh (ISIS) provided a prime example of the power of social media (i.e., twitter) by showing how some 4500 “Western foreign fighters” around the world could be drawn into the grips of a terrorist organization and radicalized through social media. To establish an ideal society, the so-called Caliphate, the message was that certain actions were required (Reicher and Haslam, 2016). But the message was also that the West is humiliating Muslims and treating them with disrespect. This is a key issue noted by Khosrokhavar (2014, 2015). The French jihadists had a profound sense of social injustice. They felt deeply excluded and divided the world into the “included,” the typical French people but also those of North African origin who made their way up, and the “excluded.” We consider in details in the next chapters, how social identity and the categorization into “us” and “them” can become a key driver and how perceived injustice and feelings of relative deprivation can be related to political violence. Overall, significance quest theory is one of the current models of violent radicalism that has probably generated the most efforts to validate its propositions through empirical research. How successful was it? Da Silva et  al. (2023) have recently presented a systematic review of this research. Out of 84 studies, they find that the predictions of the theory are confirmed in a majority of studies (N = 74). They note that the association between significance loss and extremism is not well supported. However, it is important to remind ourselves that according to the 3-N model, it is the complex interplay between Need, Narratives, and Networks that allows one to understand actions that do not necessarily follow from what one would expect on the basis of a single element of the model. A series of experiments by Leander et al. (2020) are useful to illustrate this and to show that violent actions and peaceful actions are probably the result of similar psychological processes.

Terror Management Theory

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These experiments concern situations where people can attain a goal or not in a way that has implications for one’s significance. In a first study, the network of the participants value volunteering behavior a lot or not so much. The results showed that goal-thwarted individuals reported the highest volunteering behavior to help refugees when their network valued volunteering. Thus, frustration or goal-­ thwarting, and the significance loss it implies, does not necessarily motivate violence or outgroup hostility. It can motivate nonviolent behavior when the culture of one’s network values nonviolent behavior. This was confirmed in a second experiment dealing with violence. After being goal-thwarted or not, the participants, US adults, read about the Syria civil war and ISIS and about a prospective US military intervention in Syria. Half of the participants learned that their peers opposed (vs. supported) military intervention. Participants in the pro-violence norm condition were more likely to voice a pro-violence sentiment when they were goal-thwarted (vs. not thwarted). The reverse was the case in the anti-violence norm condition with participants more likely to voice an anti-violence sentiment when thwarted (vs. not thwarted). As Kruglanski et al. (2022) suggest: “widely different narratives can be functionally equivalent in relation to the quest for significance [but] functional equivalence does not imply moral equivalence” (p. 1061).

Terror Management Theory Terror Management Theory (TMT, Greenberg et al., 1986; Greenberg and Arndt, 2013) can be seen as a motivational perspective that is complementary to the broader approach of Significance Quest Theory. As its name suggest, TMT is mainly concerned with how we cope with terror, and the theory is organized around the ultimate terror for human beings, our awareness that one thing is sure, we are not going to live indefinitely. This is an inescapable reality that was not at all part of social psychological theorizing before Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon. Emerging from an important interdisciplinary background, this approach brought, with concepts such as mortality salience, self-esteem and cultural worldviews, an almost revolutionary understanding of human psychology. Existential Motivation  The starting point of the theory is that the consciousness of our own mortality is something that is unique to humans. As such, it is probably underlying much of what we do without knowing exactly why we do it. Of course, in our day-to-day life, we are not always thinking about our own death and for a good reason. If we did, chances are that we would not be able to carry out our life as usual. TMT suggests that this existential problem has the potential to totally disrupt our mental life and leave us in a state of complete paralysis. There are people that unfortunately find themselves in such conditions with some sorts of severe psychosis, but most of us seem to manage. How do we do it? Assuming that terror management is a basic human motivation, the theory proposed a series of strategies that we use to buffer the anxiety that comes from this inescapable condition. These

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strategies can seek literal immortality (beliefs in life after death) or symbolic immortality (being part of something greater than oneself that will last forever). Key hypotheses were developed suggesting that self-esteem and cultural worldviews defined as “shared conceptions of reality” (Greenberg and Arndt, 2013, p. 402) have the function of managing our death anxiety. A gigantic program of experimental research was developed to test these hypotheses empirically (for a review, see Pyszczynski et al., 2015). Mortality Salience  The basic experimental paradigm involved creating a condition of mortality salience, a condition in which we think about the fact that we are going to die, and identify its consequences by distinguishing it from other similar painful situations. In one early experiment (see Greenberg et al., 1990), participants with a Christian background were asked to judge Jewish and Christian target persons. Before the judgment, mortality was made salient to half of the participants. The results showed more positive evaluations of the ingroup (Christian) and more negative evaluations of the outgroup (Jew) in the mortality salience condition. Why? The theory suggests that mortality salience increases the individual’s need for the protection provided by the cultural worldview and thus intensifies positive reaction to those who support one’s cultural worldview and negative reactions to those who challenge one’s worldview. Similarly, it was shown that reminders of 9/11 terrorist attacks were similar to mortality salience induction in increasing death-thought accessibility and producing similar effects such as fostering greater authoritarian tendencies (Landau et  al., 2004). More recently, Pyszczynski et  al. (2006) found that in a control condition, Iranian college students expressed a preference for a pacifist fellow student who was against the use of martyrdom attacks in the United States. However, death reminders reversed this effect, shifting the preference toward a student who supported martyrdom attacks. Although these results suggest that fear of death inevitably leads to defensive reactions in the direction of intolerance and intergroup hostility, a sizeable number of experiments showed that this is not necessarily so. For example, Greenberg et al. (1992) demonstrated that priming the value of tolerance eliminates hostile reactions to outgroups that mortality salience otherwise produced. Being part of a culture means maintaining faith in one’s cultural worldview but also living up to the values (such as tolerance) that are parts of one’s worldview. Similarly, Motyl et al. (2011) found that priming a perception of a common humanity attenuated an increase in anti-Arab prejudice among Americans reminded of death. Thus, according to research on TMT, as Nugier et al. (2016) noted: “fear, hostility or conservatism, are not the inevitable consequences of terrorism or of mortality salience” (p. 78). We will come back to examine this issue in more details in Chap. 5 when we consider the “conservative shift hypothesis” as an explanation for how people react to deadly terrorist attacks. For now, it can be seen that cultural worldviews, similar to what we will call later on cultural norms, seem to be an effective buffer when facing existential threats.

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Cultural worldviews are shared construction of reality that provides meaning and a sense of purpose to individuals. Since they are involved in protecting individuals against anxiety and existential concerns, people are motivated to have faith in their worldview and to defend them against threats (van den Bos, 2018). In this way, TMT can explain why people may be led to join radical groups or to endorse radical ideologies (Wagoner and Pyszczynski, 2023). Indeed, research by Castano et  al. (2002) suggests that coping with existential anxieties may be a reason why we are led to strongly identify with a social group. In the next chapter, we consider the theories in social psychology that directly study how social groups and social identity can shape behaviors.

Chapter 2

Theories of Intergroup Relations: Vicious Cycles Between “Us” and “Them”

This dramatic growth in social science is all to the good, since public policy should indeed be based on empirical evidence (Kymlicka 2010, p. 260)

Theories of intergroup relations developed in social psychology provide vital clues into the understanding of political violence and the need to go beyond an individualistic psychology (see Guimond, 2023). The intergroup approach was first developed by Musafer Sherif (1966) whose research was based on a general theory of social conflict, known throughout the humanities and social sciences as realistic conflict theory (Guimond, 2010; Levine and Campbell, 1972). Sherif’s central theoretical proposition is that the competitive or cooperative nature of intergroup relations largely determines the attitudes and behaviors of group members toward each other. Through research conducted in a naturalistic setting at a teenage summer camp, Sherif sought to demonstrate that when young boys were divided into two groups and made to compete for scarce resources, negative intergroup attitudes and discriminatory behaviors would be observed. Within a short period of time, well-­ behaved boys became thugs capable of insults, threats, and aggressive behavior toward outgroup members (Yzerbyt and Demoulin, 2019). In fact, life at the summer camp gradually degenerated into open warfare. In one study, the boys were settled in separate bunkhouses about a half mile apart. After introducing competitive activities between the two groups, Sherif would describe in details how everything escalated rapidly, from each side calling the other with derogatory names, to flag burning, garbage wars, fistfights, and even bunkhouse vandalizing at night, one group of boys raiding the bunkhouse of the other group. Importantly, this would happen regardless of the psychological characteristics of the boys involved, and even if the best friend from one of the boys before the study was in the opposing camp. This “best friend” became slowly but surely an “enemy,” establishing the need to distinguish conceptually between interpersonal relations and intergroup relations. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Guimond, A. Nugier, The Social and Political Psychology of Violent Radicalism, Peace Psychology Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46254-2_2

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Drawing on Sherif, Taylor and Moghaddam (1994) define the concept of intergroup relations as “any aspect of human interaction that involves individuals perceiving themselves as members of a social category or being perceived by others as belonging to a social category” (p.  6). Thus, the number of people physically in interactions is not a defining feature of group relations. Rather two individuals in social interactions can fully represent an intergroup relation to the extent that they perceived themselves as belonging to different social categories. For Sherif, and contrary to the dominant theories of social psychology at the time (e.g., Adorno et al., 1950), hostility in interpersonal relations is not a sound basis for an explanation of hostility in intergroup relations. Interpersonal relations involve intimate and relatively sophisticated knowledge of another person. In contrast, hate crimes, which primarily target racial, ethnic, or religious minorities (Badaan and Jost, 2020), involve perpetrators who may travel thousands of miles to harm their victims without having the least knowledge of their personal characteristics (Dunbar, 2018). This is why it is critical to consider that when studying terrorism and political violence, one is not studying interpersonal but intergroup relations. When Reicher and Haslam (2016), international experts in studying and applying the intergroup approach, look at terrorism, they cite Atran (2010) to suggest that “what turns someone into a fanatic” is not some peculiar psychological predispositions or defects “but the person-changing dynamic of the group” to which he or she belongs. There is much evidence to support this view coming from social identity and self-categorization theories (Turner and Reynolds, 2001, 2012).

The Social Identity Perspective Sherif’s work served as a foundation for the development in Europe of Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1972; Tajfel and Turner, 1979). This theory has contributed to a renewed interest in intergroup relations and provided the groundwork for the development of a new collective psychology of group relations. Today, it represents one of the most important theoretical approaches in social psychology (Brown, 2020). Early Development  In 1970, Tajfel published an article in Scientific American that presented a new experimental paradigm known as the “minimal group paradigm.” The author conducted a laboratory study of the minimal conditions under which members of one group exhibit discriminatory behaviors toward members of another group. All the economic, political, or historical factors that could lead to discrimination were carefully removed from the experimental situation by creating two artificial groups. Using an inconsequential pretext (preference for an abstract painting by Klee or Kandinsky), participants were assigned to one group (“you are in the Klee group”), and they learned of the existence of another group (the Kandinsky group). No one knew the identity of the other members of either the Klee or Kandinsky group, and there was no interaction between the members of the two groups. The two groups were created completely artificially and randomly. After this

A New Understanding of Social Groups

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c­ ategorization into two groups, the experimenter explained to the participants that the purpose of the experiment was to study decision-making. Each participant had to decide how to divide points or monetary resources between two anonymous individuals, one of whom was presented as a “Klee group member” and the other as a “Kandinsky group member.” The purpose was to measure discriminatory behavior and determine whether more resources were granted to one group and less to the other group, i.e., a differential treatment, with no justification other than group membership, that instantiate an instance of discrimination. Under this paradigm, the goal of the program of research was to add, one by one, variables supposed to be causes of discrimination (e.g., intergroup competition) and to measure their effects. However, the initial findings, which were subsequently confirmed in many other laboratories, showed that no variables other than social categorization were necessary. Some participants distributed resources in a strictly egalitarian manner, but the greatest tendency in the responses was to give more to members of one’s group and even to try to maximize the difference between the two groups in favor of the ingroup. These discriminatory behaviors occurred in the absence of prejudice or any history of rivalry between the Klee and Kandinsky groups. As Tajfel (1970) wrote: “Apparently, the mere fact of division into groups is enough to trigger discriminatory behavior” (p. 96).

A New Understanding of Social Groups These minimal group experiments generated through the development of Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) and the complementary Self-Categorization Theory (Turner, 1987), a new perspective on the psychology of social groups that is now referred to as the social identity perspective (Turner and Reynolds, 2001). Social groups have always been an important topic of research in social psychology. But up to the 1960s, researchers as part of the human relations movement for example were studying the structure and functioning of small groups. A group was defined as two or more individuals having face-to-face interactions. Psychology was seen as central to an understanding of these small groups. The study of crowds and large social collection of individuals (i.e., social class, culture, ethnicity, gender) was left to sociologists. With the identification of the central role of social categorization, that is the division of the social world into “us” and “them,” “ingroup” and “outgroup,” Tajfel and Tuner (1979) suggested that psychology was in fact much more important than previously assumed in the analysis of the behavior of large social groups such as nations, political parties, or social movements. Let us consider the category “Americans.” Whereas people living in the United States can readily define themselves as members of this social group and feel a strong sense of belonging with this group, none of them has ever interacted face to face with more than a few individuals who are Americans. Nobody in the United States has firsthand knowledge of the more than 350 million of individuals who are member of this

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group. Thus, this knowledge is entirely indirect, socially and psychologically mediated. It turns out that the way we categorize birds, trees, or fruits in various subcategories has much in common with the ways in which we categorize other people in terms of gender, race, or national origin (Oakes et al., 1994). The main difference between social categorization and nonsocial categorization is that in the former case, we can be ourselves member of one of the categories, and this is the basis of our social identity. Tajfel and Tuner (1979) thus defined the central concept of social identity as “those aspects of an individual’s self-image which derive from the social categories to which he [or she] perceives himself [or herself] as belonging” (p. 40). From that point on, it was increasingly understood that one central aspect of intergroup relations is this psychological and subjective sense of group membership called social identity. Research then took a clear cognitive turn. It is not the objective features of the groups that matter but the extent to which an individual starts to adopt a given group membership as an important part of his or her self-definition. Brubaker et al. (2004) argued for a new conceptualization of “ethnicity, race, and nation as perspectives on the world rather than entities in the world” (p.  31). Considering religious groups and the role of religion in terrorism, this suggests that being a Muslim as an objective fact may have little to do with political violence and terrorism compared to a subjective sense of belonging to a group that may be called Muslims. Indeed, reviews of the evidence suggest that “more often than not, research failed to support the relevance of being Islamic to membership in terrorist organizations” (Desmarais et al., 2017; see also Wolfowicz et al., 2021). Nevertheless, the association between “Muslims” and “terrorism” is deeply ingrained in people’s mind as shown recently by Arnoult et al. (2023) using the Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald et al., 1998). Thus, when governments in the West start to define common religious practices of Muslims as signs of radicalism, this may probably be more a sign of moral panic than an adequate understanding of the sources of radicalization. As this is a question that is central to any analysis of Jihadi-inspired terrorism, we will present extensive evidence directly related to this issue of religious affiliation and practices in Chap. 4. Self-categorization theory  With Self-Categorization Theory, Turner (1987) provided much needed advances in focusing on how the process of categorization applies to the self. While social identity theory describes ingroup-outgroup categorization, Turner’s theory (1987) deals with self-categorization and argues that the self-concept, far from being a rigid psychological structure, is extremely flexible and malleable. Depending on the context, an individual can adopt an almost infinite number of self-categorizations: as a friend, brother, father, manager, environmental activist, Parisian, European, etc. In practice, Turner (1987) points out that there are three main levels of self-categorization: the level of personal identity (I am a singular individual different from others); the level of social identity (I am an interchangeable member of a group); and the supraordinate level (I am a human being). The psychology of this individual (the individual’s values, opinions, personality, behavior) can change significantly depending on which level of self-categorization is activated at a specific moment (Guimond, 2010; Turner et  al., 1994; Turner and

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Reynolds, 2012). Is this of importance for an area such as terrorism and political violence? While an affirmative answer can be expected from social psychologists familiar with this theory, it is more telling to find out that nonsocial psychologists and internationally recognized experts in the domain such as Marc Sageman (2017) indeed argue that no other theoretical frameworks may be as relevant. In his most recent book, Sageman (2017) writes: “Self-categorization is the core concept of a social science project analyzing the behavior of groups, known as the social identity perspective. This perspective allows to transcend the intuitive but unexamined and erroneous assumptions guiding our understanding of how people become terrorists, which has resulted in stagnation in terrorism research” (p. 4). He then goes on to present his own “model of the turn to political violence” that is heavily dependent of the social identity perspective. The model advocated in the present book will essentially expand on this work and provide in part II the contemporary empirical evidence that has not been offered by Sageman (2017) nor by self-categorization theorists. As we will see, there are still a number of blind spots but core features of the explanation offered by Sageman (2017) based on the social identity perspective are strongly supported. Before that, we need to bear in mind existing evidence about the power of self-categorization and the process of group socialization. Group Socialization  We referred above with Reicher and Haslam (2016) to the “person-changing dynamic of the group” as important to understand who turns to terrorism rather than relying on intuitive explanations based on some sorts of personality defects. While we are not aware of strong empirical evidence for this view with regard to terrorism, and as such this point can still be a matter of debate, there is general agreement across the psychological and social sciences that an individual’s outlook can be changed through group socialization (Guimond and Nugier, 2021). The famous Bennington study of Ted Newcomb (1943) provides an early and stunning example (see Newcomb et al., 1967; Alwin, et al., 1991). The Bennington college in Vermont, a college for women-only in the 1930s, attracted students coming from rich and conservative American families. Newcomb (1943) studied how 4 years at this liberal arts college would affect the students. He found that most students gradually moved away from the conservative values of their parents to adopt the much more radical outlook that characterized their upper-level peers at Bennington as well as the faculty of which Newcomb was a part. Moreover, a follow-­up of these students 25 years (Newcomb et al., 1967) and even 50 years later (Alwin et al., 1991) showed that this group socialization effect persisted for the rest of their lives. This persistence was explained by the fact that during their adult life, the Bennington students selected a social environment (husbands, friends, and so on) that was consistent with their political views and so encountered little opportunity for change. But how can we explain the initial attitude change? Newcomb (1943) noticed that those who remained conservative, a minority, were more marginal members and less well-integrated within Bennington. He argued that it was a question of reference group. Those who changed took the Bennington community as a membership group and as a reference group for their aspirations and values. In contrast, for the minority who did not change, Bennington was a membership group

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but not a reference group. This is quite consistent with the modern approach developed within the social identity perspective. More direct evidence comes from a longitudinal study conducted in a Canadian military academy (Guimond, 2000). As in the Bennington study, entering first-year officer cadets were tested during their first week of class and then retested 4 years later when they were about to graduate. In contrast to the liberal norm at Bennington, a more conservative and authoritarian outlook was expected to be normative in a military academy. Consequently, it was predicted that the change would go in the direction of becoming more conservative over time, not less. Moreover, to test hypotheses derived from self-categorization theory, identification with various groups was measured at midpoint in the program. Self-categorization theory suggests a simple three-stage process of group socialization: people identify with a new group, they learn about the norms and values of that group, and then “assign these norms to themselves (…) and thus their behavior becomes more normative” (Turner 1987, pp. 72–73). More specifically, because the military is a symbol of nationalism that should attract people who identify strongly with their country, strength of identification with “Canadians” was measured at midpoint in the program. However, this identity was not expected to account for attitude change over time as participants were not being socialized as “Canadians” but as “Canadian military officer.” Thus, the extent to which participants identified as a “Canadian military officer” was also measured, and Guimond (2000) predicted that this identification would moderate attitude change. The results strongly confirmed these predictions. There was an overall attitude change in a conservative direction among the sample as a whole. From first to fourth year, participants became more prejudiced against outgroups and more likely to believe that economic inequalities are legitimate, changes going in direction opposite to those observed by Newcomb (1943). Moreover, this attitude change interacted with the level of identification as “Canadian Military Officer,” the group into which participants were being socialized. More specifically, among the weak identifiers, there was no significant attitude change whatsoever, despite the fact that these participants were subjected for 4 years to the same socialization experience. The attitude change was located among those who identified with the category “Canadian Military Officer.” These results confirm an important claim of self-categorization theory by showing that “once individuals adopt a new self-definition, they also are more likely to acquire over time a new way to look at intergroup relations” (Guimond, 2000, p. 348). It should be noted that the initial attitudes and beliefs of the participants did not differ as a function of their level of identification as a military officer. Thus, it does not seem to be the case that strong identifiers were initially particularly conservative or having a peculiar personality. In fact, the initial attitudes and beliefs measured in first year (but not the same attitudes measured in fourth year) were found to be significantly related with national identity as “Canadians.” Interestingly, those who identified more strongly as Canadian were initially less conservative than others. Thus, the strength of national identity was in this case going in a direction opposite

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to the nature of the change that was to occur following the socialization process. There is little doubt then that in terms of subscribing to a conservative ideology or its opposite, a liberal-left ideology, the same processes of self-categorization and group socialization are of prime importance. This type of “person-changing group dynamics” was also shown repeatedly for “personality” characteristics such as Social Dominance Orientation (SDO, Pratto et al., 1994) that turned out to be a malleable set of ideological beliefs rather than the stable and enduring psychological predisposition it was purported to be (see Dambrun et al., 2009; Guimond 2006; Guimond et al., 2003, 2006; see also Osborne et al., 2023). Many of these studies used an experimental procedure involving random allocations of participants to conditions, insuring that the conclusion is valid regardless of the initial personality predispositions of the participants. Social Identity and Political Violence  We have argued above that the social identity perspective provides a theoretical framework to understand intergroup relations that can be of critical importance to understand terrorism and political violence. We have shown how, through group socialization, anybody can be led to endorse attitudes and beliefs that they may have rejected otherwise, and that social identity is indeed a key social-psychological process in this regard. Consistent with the reference group explanation of Newcomb (1943) but going much deeper in the explanation of the psychological processes involved, the social identity perspective points out that what we consider as valid, true, or correct information may depend on whether the source of this information is perceived to be the ingroup or an outgroup. In the words of Turner (1987), “a response is persuasive to the degree that it represents and participates in some shared consensual reaction stereotypically associated with an in-group self-category and hence is perceived as valid, correct, competent” (p. 76). This is why those who came to perceive military officers as an in-group changed more: they perceived certain beliefs as more valid than those who did not self-categorize as military officers (Guimond, 2000). This is also how an individual who defines himself or herself as a member of a terrorist group will perceive reality in a radically different way. But how relevant is the social identity perspective for an explanation of actual collective action, protest movements, or political violence? This is an area where much research have been conducted, stimulated in part by social identity and self-categorization theories. Let us assume that a big protest march is organized against nuclear energy, as was often the case in the 1980s and 1990s. Who will participate in this march? What are the main factors that could allow us to predict not only the support for this march but the actual participation in it? Intuitively, one would expect that attitudes and beliefs regarding nuclear energy would be among the top of the list. Those who strongly oppose nuclear energy, who thinks it is very dangerous, should be more likely to participate. Indeed, if we consider one of the main theories of social behavior in the social sciences, the Theory of Reasoned Action and Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), one would expect that those who participate will be those who have the intention to participate, and this behavioral intention will depend on a specific combination of attitudes and beliefs regarding nuclear energy, as explained by the theory. Considering the theoretical

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approach developed within the social identity perspective can suggest however a very different answer, in part because explaining collective action is not the same as explaining individual action. To illustrate that point, Tajfel (1978) introduced the idea of an interpersonal-­ intergroup continuum in social behavior. At one extreme of the continuum, one finds interactions between two or more individuals that are fully determined by their individual characteristics and not at all by membership in a particular group or social category. This is the interpersonal pole of the behavioral continuum. Two lovers sitting in a park in the afternoon would be an example. But at the other extreme, one finds interactions between two or more individuals that are fully determined by their group membership and not at all by their individual characteristics. University students in a protest march facing the police in their riot gear would be an example. This is the intergroup pole of the behavioral continuum. Collective actions are instances of behavior in terms of the group near the extreme of the intergroup pole, not instances of interpersonal behaviors. What leads people to display predominantly intergroup as oppose to interpersonal behaviors? Perhaps the most fundamental contribution of Self-Categorization Theory is to provide a clear, coherent, and simple answer to this question (Turner and Reynolds, 2001). As Brown and Turner (1981) explained « the transition in self-­ concept functioning from personal to social identity corresponds to and is responsible for a shift from interpersonal to intergroup behavior » (p.  38). The major hypothesis emerging from this theoretical perspective then is that the categorization of self as a group member is the main factor that accounts for collective behavior (Turner, 1987). Sageman (2017) considers this to be central in his model of political violence. As he states, paraphrasing Turner (1987): “Self-categorization, or the acquisition of a shared social identity, is what makes collective behavior possible” (p. 6). Thus, this approach suggests that social identity, how people define themselves rather than what they think about the issue of nuclear energy, would be among the most important predictors of the participation in collective action. In their influential meta-analysis, van Zomeren et  al. (2008) have shown that there is overall strong research support for the view that social identity is indeed one of the main predictors of collective action, with a sense of injustice and perceived efficacy as two additional independent predictors. This model is known as SIMCA: the Social Identity Model of Collective Action. We will examine the role of the perception of injustice in details in the next section on Relative Deprivation Theory. Concerning social identity, an important specification emerged from van Zomeren et al. (2008) with the concept of “politicized social identity.” Research suggests that the identity that is most predictive of collective action is the identity of an “activist” rather than identification with the broad social category that is involved in collective action. For example, for a protest movement defending women’s rights, a social identity as a woman or as a feminist may be less important than defining oneself as a “feminist activist.” Sageman (2017) has incorporated this in his model, supporting it with historical evidence. Still, research so far has not clarified the extent to which social identity can predict the participation in a terrorist organization, or actual acts of political violence, most studies being concerned with protest movements that are

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nonviolent. This is why it is important to consider the results of a study conducted recently on the Yellow Vests movement in France (Adam-Troian et al., 2021). The Yellow Vests Movement  The French Yellow Vests (YV) movement has been one of the most influential protest movements in Europe during the last decades. Born on social media platforms at the end of 2018 as a protest against an announced tax increase on fuel, it evolved into a movement that has shaken the social and political fabric of the French establishment in unprecedented ways. Its impact has been compared to the movements that have had the greatest historical significance in France and worldwide, including the revolution of 1789 (Mazeau, 2019). The events surrounding this movement, spanning over more than 14 months, occurring all over France and spreading to the neighboring countries, form an extremely complex picture of human social and political behaviors. Essentially two types of actions were observed, often involving middle-age people who were taking part in a protest movement for the first time in their lives: blocking roundabouts in the countryside, at the outskirts of small communities, and national march organized every Saturday in midsize and large cities. Thus, this was a grassroots phenomenon taking unusual forms. After several months of peaceful demonstrations, parts of the protests turned sour causing travel disruptions due to blocked motorways, violent clashes with the police, and destruction of public and private property including major tourist areas such as Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysées. Public support for the movement was extremely high, around 70% of the French population, and remained high even after the protests escalated (Lüders et al., 2021). Whereas most studies of this movement examined the role of various ideological beliefs in order to explain participation in the movement, Adam-Troian et al. (2021) considered if the simple fact of perceiving oneself as a group member could play a role. It was argued that the ability of the movement to mobilize thousands of individuals in France was resulting from the fact that the movement created a new and highly distinctive politicized identity: the yellow vest identity. Across several studies, with a total of 1849 participants surveyed during the peak of the movement, Adam-Troian et al. (2021) used two distinct measures of social identity. A first measure using a 7-point rating scale read: “To what extent do you identify with the members of the Yellow Vests?” (1 = not at all; 7 = completely). In the second measure, participants responded to the following question: “Would you say that you are yourself a yellow vest?” There were three response options: (1) Yes, I think of myself as being a Yellow Vest; (2) No but I support the Yellow Vests movement; or (3) No. This item was reverse coded so that higher score indicated higher identification with the movement. There were also several measures of participation in the movements, some reflecting the intention to participate in the future, and some reflecting the actual participation in the movement. Finally, through factor analyses, a distinction was also made between participation in peaceful protest (e.g., activism) and participation in violent actions (e.g., radicalism). For example, one statement of the 4-item radicalism intention scale read: “I could still support the Yellow Vests even if they sometimes use violence.”

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In contrast to the role of sociodemographic characteristics or various measures of ideological beliefs, the results showed that identification as a yellow vest was clearly the main factor predicting participation in the movement. For example, in Study 1a, Adam-Troian et  al. (2021) report very strong correlations between identification with the yellow vests and both violent (r = 0.77) and nonviolent (r = 0.82) collective actions. In contrast, the correlations with (right-left) political orientation, although statistically significant, were much more modest (−0.16 and −0.30 respectively), with left-wing participants being more active. These results are important for several reasons. First, because these data were obtained in a context of violence (with more than 25,000 people injured and 11 deaths of which 9 can be directly related to the movement), showing that the simple fact of defining oneself as a yellow vest is such a powerful factor clearly supports the relevance of the social identity perspective for an explanation of terrorism and political violence. Second, other major theories of social behavior such as the theory of planned behavior seem of questionable relevance as these theories do not include the role of social identity in the explanation of behavioral intention (see Willis et al., 2020). Finally, although the context of the YV movement was very peculiar and had little to do with any of the Jihadi-­ inspired terrorist attacks that are of concern in this book, it can readily be seen that with the help of a strong theoretical framework, important lessons can be learned. As noted above, van Zomeren et al. (2008) showed that identity, injustice, and efficacy are the three important predictors of participation in peaceful collective action. But this does not mean that these factors are also important to explain violent collective action. In fact, Tausch et al. (2011) have shown in a series of studies that two of these determinants, injustice and efficacy, were not playing the same role in the explanation of violent collective actions as oppose to nonviolent ones. For efficacy, van Zomeren et al. (2008) stated that the more people think that the movement can be effective in bringing change, the more likely is the participation. Tausch et al. (2011) found exactly the reverse for violent collective action: the more people think that change is not possible, the more likely is the participation in violent protests. Thus, an important feature of the research conducted by Adam-Troian et al. (2021) was to examine this issue as it pertains to the role of social identity, something that was not considered by Tausch et al. (2011). Although more research is needed, particularly among terrorist organizations, the results of Adam-Troian et al. (2021) as noted above clearly support the view that self-categorization plays a fundamental role in both terrorism and peaceful collective actions. However, this role should not be seen in isolation from all other factors. To the contrary, it will be seen in Chap. 4 that radicalization and ultimately terrorism do not occur in a vacuum. It is out of the dynamic relations between “us” and “them” that political violence and terrorism emerge. Indeed, this general principle could be termed the first law of radicalism: when peaceful protests are met with continued repression and are perceived as such, the likelihood that group members will start advocating the use of more radical actions increases. Social Media Use  Nobody in France or elsewhere predicted the emergence of the Yellow Vests movement and its long-lasting impact. Thus, although our

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u­ nderstanding of human behavior can be seen as important and improving, we are still very far from grasping everything of importance. Nevertheless, there is general agreement that one major feature of the modern world, the use of new communication devices, is having such a strong impact that it can possibly alter all previous rules of collective action. The Yellow Vests movement is a case in point because it started out as an online petition against a tax in fuel prices that received 226,000 signatures in 10 days, going up to 860,000 signatures on the eve of a general online call to make of November 17, 2018, a national day of protest (Adam-Troian et al., 2021). In other words, we know that social media use, mainly Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, played a decisive role in the birth of the Yellow Vests movement. We also know as noted above that communication via remote electronic devices was a central feature of Jihadi-inspired terrorism (Smith et al., 2019). As radicalization on the internet is now a major focus of research, Adam-Troian et al. (2021, Study 2) explored the relations between social identity, social media use, and participation in collective action as part of the YV movement. The results showed first that social media use was significantly correlated with the actual participation in collective action, consistent with past research. The more frequently participants reported using social media to get information about the YV, the more likely they were to report being active in roundabouts and highway toll booths across France. This effect was independent of age, gender, political orientation, and levels of education. Of course, being correlational, these data do not allow to suggest that social media use is a cause of offline activism. However, given that self-categorization as a yellow vest was also predictive of collective action, two different models of the role of social media use were tested. Studying students protest in Hong Kong, Lee et  al. (2017) found support for a model suggesting that the effects of social-psychological determinants of collective action, such as efficacy, were mediated by social media use. In other words, the psychological variables previously held to be direct determinants of mobilization to action would all be in fact indirectly related to action and filtered through the effect of social media use. This suggests that for the yellow vest, the effect of self-categorization as a yellow vest on collective action would be mediated by social media use. Adam-Troian et al. (2021) found no support for this model. An alternative model is that it is the effect of social media use on action that is mediated by identification as a yellow vest. As shown in Fig. 2.1, this model was fully supported by the data. Social media use is a strong predictor of identification as a yellow vest, and it is only through this identification that it relates to collective action. This is clearly at variance with Lee et al. (2017). However, because Lee et al. (2017) studied the role of many social-psychological determinants but not that of social identity, these results are not necessarily contradicting those reported by Lee et al. (2017). There is an important take-home message from these results that is consistent with much research conducted within the social identity perspective. The effect of communicating and sharing information on social media depends on how individuals define themselves and on how they relate to others with whom they are

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Yellow Vest Idenficaon .41***

.42***

Social media use

.19***(.02)

Collecve acon

(Indirect effect: .17***)

Fig. 2.1  Mediated effect of social media use on collective action. Higher social media use was associated with higher Yellow Vest (YV) identification, which in turn predicted reported more frequent collective action. Standardized coefficients are displayed with the coefficient between social media use and collective action controlling for YV identification in parentheses. ***p < 0.001. (Adapted from Adam-Troian et al., 2021; Study 2)

communicating. In fact, it can shape how people will define themselves. Researchers who have studied the role of social media in the context of various social movements from a social identity perspective indeed come up with theoretical propositions reflecting the model displayed in Fig. 2.1: social interaction including online interactions leads to social identity formation that leads to collective action (see Smith et al., 2019). In France, the more people used social media platforms in relation with issues concerning the yellow vest, the more likely they were to define themselves as a yellow vest. Thus, if self-categorization strongly predicts collective action, it is itself predicted by online social media use. This means that the value of any given piece of information, gathered on social media or elsewhere, can have different psychological effects depending on whether it is coming from Al-Qaeda, Donald Trump, supporters of the yellow vests, the government, and so on. Ingroup sources are likely to be seen as more credible and more informative. As Van Bavel and Packer (2021) write: “social identities provide the lenses through which we perceive events” (p. 34). This is exactly what the study of group socialization examined previously pointed to (see Guimond 2000). Given a common set of events, only those who defined themselves as military officers changed their views in the direction of the prevailing conservative norm. The Yellow Vests movement started out as a peaceful movement in which people who usually have no say on anything started to speak out. Past research has shown that people involved in social movements, ghetto riots, urban violence, or even terrorism were more highly educated than those not involved (see Guimond, 2003; Smith et al., 2019). Here, Adam-Troian et al. (2021) found the reverse: people active in roundabouts had a lower level of education compared to those who were less active or not participating at all, and this relationship was independent of self-­ categorization as a yellow vest. So, this movement started as a bunch of lower-­ middle class people who wanted to voice their anger using peaceful means of protest. It did not start as a group of fanatics trying to destroy everything that was in

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their way. This important affective-emotional component, group-based anger, is severely missing in the social identity perspective but critically important in a complementary approach called Relative Deprivation Theory that we now consider.

 elative Deprivation Theory: Grievances R and Collective Action Reviews of existing research on Islamist radicalism (Kaya et al., 2023) inevitably point to the role of collective grievances of some sorts as being related to various terrorism outcomes (Desmarais et al., 2017). In their general model of radicalization, Smith et al. (2019) explicitly propose that “social interaction about grievances” (including online interactions) is the main factor shaping social identity formation that directly leads to violent action. Relative Deprivation Theory is precisely a theory about grievances, about the psychological processes that give rise to feeling aggrieved, and about the behavioral consequences (Crosby, 1976; Dubé and Guimond, 1986). Over the last 50 years, it has been one of the most influential theoretical approaches in social psychology but also in political science, economics, and history (Anier et al., 2016; Manunta et al., 2022; Urbanska and Guimond, 2018). It is being now used as one of the main explanations for the radicalization of Muslims in Western countries, but with major problems reflecting a lack of knowledge of how research on this theory has evolved over the last 40 years. Here, we come back to trace this theoretical evolution and explain the nature of these problems. To be clear, we will suggest that contrary to current thinking, relative deprivation is not a major cause of radicalization. In Chap. 4, we will present empirical evidence testing an alternative viewpoint about the role of relative deprivation and grievances compatible with the staircase model of radicalism (Moghaddam, 2005). Development of the Theory  The theory of relative deprivation has had an eventful history with its ups and downs. In the 1960s and 1970s, an intense period of social protest and demands around the world, and more particularly in France with May 1968, relative deprivation emerged as the preferred conceptual and theoretical tool for analyzing such events. As Guimond and Tougas (1999) point out, the general idea is that individuals protest and revolt, not when they are deprived absolutely but when they feel deprived or treated unfairly in relation to other individuals or groups with whom they compare themselves. At that time, the world discovered with surprise that individuals from “well-tod­ o” backgrounds, and not the poor and unemployed, could mobilize collectively and engage in actions aimed at overturning the established order (Guimond 2003). Why? It was a matter of psychology, it was said. The poorest people, preoccupied with their immediate survival and not anticipating any possible change in their situation, saw no reason to try to change things. In contrast, people whose situation had improved relative to others became aware that change is possible and became even

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more frustrated at not being able to achieve it. These ideas underlie much work in the field, including Crosby’s (1976) prominent “egoistical relative deprivation” model. Crosby (1976) integrates into a single model research on a whole series of very important mini-theories in social psychology: social exchange theory (Homans, 1974), equity theory (Walster et  al., 1978), social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954; Guimond, 2006), the frustration-aggression hypothesis (Dollard et al., 1939), just-world belief theory (Lerner, 1982), and reference group theory (Merton and Kitt, 1950). She then proposes five preconditions that would cause relative deprivation, which she defines as “the feeling of being unfairly deprived of X.” To feel deprived of X, a person must (1) see that someone else has X, (2) want X, (3) believe that he or she deserves X, (4) believe that it is possible to obtain X, and (5) not consider himself or herself responsible for not having X. The model also predicts that relative deprivation results in four classes of behaviors, stress symptoms, self-­ improvement behaviors, “violence against society,” and constructive changes in society. The idea of explaining political violence by relative deprivation is therefore not entirely new. At that time, this idea was also found outside of social psychology with Davies’ theory of revolutions (1971) or Gurr’s theory of political violence (1970). However, the results were not forthcoming (Anier et  al., 2016; Dubé and Guimond, 1986; Guimond, 2003). Egoistical relative deprivation turns out to be a poor predictor of individuals’ engagement in a social movement. Moreover, at the conceptual level, the proposed explanation was severely criticized by Billig (1976) or Tajfel (1976) for its reductive and individualistic side. Crosby’s model (1976) equates individual (stress, self-improvement) and collective (political violence, social change) consequences of relative deprivation. It does not explain how the feelings of egoistical deprivation of a large number of individuals, which may be quite disparate, become a collective movement with a common cause. In fact, this model seems to confuse a concern for individual social mobility with a concern for social change (Guimond and Dubé-Simard 1983). Social mobility is about an individual’s position in the social structure. It is logical to think that the individual who wishes to improve this position is dissatisfied with the one he or she occupies. She or he experiences egoistical relative deprivation. Social movements, on the other hand, involve a different logic. They are collective efforts aimed at social change. Social change involves changes in structure and changes in the position of groups in society, but not necessarily changes in the position of particular individuals. Following Runciman (1966), one might therefore think that it is the way one evaluates the position of groups in society, and not the way one evaluates one’s own individual position, that should be relevant to the explanation of social movements. Runciman (1966), who originated the concept of “egoistical relative deprivation,” an individual’s dissatisfaction with his or her individual position in society, therefore proposes to also study what he called “fraternal relative deprivation,” that is, the individual’s dissatisfaction with the position of groups in society. Once research turned to the role of this fraternal relative deprivation identified by Runciman (1966), which can be more simply called group-based relative deprivation as opposed to individual relative deprivation, much stronger results were

Relative Deprivation Theory: Grievances and Collective Action

25

obtained in explaining engagement in social movements (see Anier et  al., 2016). Pettigrew developed this research for the explanation of anti-immigrant prejudice in Europe (Pettigrew et al., 1998). The observations are clear: in France, Germany, the Netherlands, or the United Kingdom, it is the feeling that the national group to which one belongs is treated relatively less well compared to immigrants, which explains the population’s hostile attitudes toward immigrants, not the feeling of being, as an individual, unfairly treated relative to others (see also Dambrun and Guimond 2001). Whereas Crosby’s (1976) egoistical relative deprivation involves a comparison between self and others, group-based relative deprivation involves a process of intergroup comparison. The individual compares the group to which he or she belongs, and with which he or she identifies, to a relevant outgroup (male/ female; French/immigrant; rich/poor, etc.). Meuleman et al. (2020) recently showed that this type of group-based relative deprivation involving a comparison between the national ingroup and immigrants plays an important role in ethnic threat perceptions within 20 European countries. Thus, group-based relative deprivation is an important factor in intergroup relations. However, these results by Meuleman et al. (2020) remain correlational and do not support the claim that group-based relative deprivation causes prejudice. Guimond and Dambrun (2002) presented experimental results to address this limit. When participants were led to view their ingroup as being treated unfairly compared to another group, Guimond and Dambrun (2002) observe an increase in prejudice in these participants compared to those of a control group (see also Moscatelli et al., 2014). For the explanation of social movements and the participation in collective action, it is also well established that group relative deprivation plays an important role, not egoistical or personal relative deprivation (Anier et al., 2016; Guimond and Tougas, 1999; van Zomeren et al., 2008). A key finding from Smith et al.’s (2012) meta-analysis of research on relative deprivation is that feelings of group injustice (group-based relative deprivation) are robust predictors of collective mobilization and action. Cognition and Emotion: The Components of Group-Based Relative Deprivation  Research has also highlighted the importance of distinguishing between cognitions and emotions as components of group relative deprivation (Lüders et al., 2021). Early in relative deprivation research, Cook et al. (1977) noted that for some researchers, relative deprivation refers to a perceived gap in positions on the social scale. For example, Lantos and Forgas (2021, p. 66) write that relative deprivation is the “perception” that the ingroup is disadvantaged in comparison to others. The consequence of such a definition is that some research simply measured this perception. Yet, relative deprivation is also often defined as an emotion of anger, resentment, or outrage at socioeconomic disparities (Martin et  al., 1984). Obaidi et al. (2019) offer such a definition by referring to “feelings of discontent that occur when people perceive that members of their group have less than they are entitled to” (p.  2). This cognition-emotion distinction is important to consider. Indeed, Guimond and Dubé-Simard (1983) have shown that the effect of the perception of greater or lesser inequality (cognitive component) on social engagement can be seen

26

2  Theories of Intergroup Relations: Vicious Cycles Between “Us” and “Them”

to be mediated by the affective component of group-based relative deprivation (feelings of discontent, anger). Several studies have confirmed this proposition: the affective component of group-based relative deprivation is more strongly related to activism compared to the cognitive component (Smith et  al., 2012; Tougas and Veilleux, 1990). In 1993, Eliot Smith proposed to theoretically develop this affective component of group-based relative deprivation based on self-categorization theory (Turner 1987). This involved recognizing that the emotions implicated in group relative deprivation arise directly from belonging to a group and from categorizing oneself as a member of that group. The theory of intergroup emotions was then taking shape, giving rise to a whole body of research whose findings are entirely consistent with the role of group-based relative deprivation in intergroup relations (Mackie et al., 2008; Yzerbyt and Aubé, 2022). Group-Based Relative Deprivation and Violent Radicalism  Very recently, a new body of work has set out to demonstrate that group relative deprivation is an explanatory factor for violent extremism in the context of Islamist terrorism. Verkuyten (2018), reviewing the literature aimed at understanding the radicalization of Muslim youth in Europe, first noted the lack of empirical studies. Nevertheless, he considers that the perception of injustice would be an important factor: “Radicalization would be the result of a collective discontent caused by a sense of relative deprivation” (p. 25). In a review of the literature, Power et al. (2020) consider that recent research clearly highlights the role of relative deprivation in explaining collective violence. Similarly, Kunst and Obaidi (2020) discuss the “re-­ emergence” of relative deprivation as an explanation for violent extremism. This assumption figures centrally in the work of van den Bos (2018, 2020). In his book, he proposes a model in which radicalization arises directly from perceptions of injustice emanating from relative deprivation or experiences of unfair treatment. According to van den Bos (2018, p. 9), “normal psychological processes pertaining to the experience of unfairness may lead people to adhere to abnormal extremist beliefs and engage in abnormal terrorist behaviors.” van den Bos (2018) reports interesting results suggesting that relative deprivation may play as much a role in the radicalization of far-right extremists as it does in the radicalization of Muslims. Regarding far-right people in the Netherlands, van den Bos (2018) finds that they attribute the source of their collective deprivation to Muslims. They believe that Muslims prevent them from enjoying tangible or symbolic resources (jobs, housing, etc.). van den Bos (2018) then refers to this as horizontal group-based relative deprivation, since it involves a comparison between different groups in society. In contrast, when it comes to Muslims, he instead observes a vertical group-based relative deprivation. Indeed, Muslims do not seem to be so concerned about comparisons with people on the extreme right. Rather, they attribute the source of their deprivation to the behavior of politicians and the ruling elite (prime minister, government) who do nothing to defend their rights.

Relative Deprivation Theory: Grievances and Collective Action

27

They also talk about the police and judges and how the authorities in place treat members of their group compared to members of other groups. In short, relative deprivation theory would be of particular interest, because it may be able to account for radicalization processes that involve groups with very different political or religious orientations. The fact remains, however, that in this type of study, van den Bos (2018) does not directly document the relationships between group relative deprivation and radicalism. van Bergen et al. (2015) proposed one of the first empirical studies on this topic. Participants were young Muslim people of Turkish or Moroccan origin between the ages of 14 and 18 living in the Netherlands. van Bergen et al. measured group-based relative deprivation with a three-item scale (e.g., “I think people with my ethnic background or religion do not get as many chances as other groups in the Netherlands”). They measured attitudes toward violence with two items (e.g., “I can understand others who use violence to defend their ethnic or religious group”). The results showed positive and significant links between group-based relative deprivation and positive attitudes toward the use of violence. These findings were supported by Obaidi et al. (2019) who present results from seven studies. They argued that Western-born Muslims are more likely than non-­ Western-­born Muslims to compare themselves to Westerners and experience feelings of group-based relative deprivation. Therefore, they hypothesize that Western-born Muslims are more likely to be radicalized and that the explanatory factor would be group-based relative deprivation. Obaidi et  al. (2019) measure group-based relative deprivation using six items (e.g., “Muslims will always be at the bottom and non-Muslims Westerners at the top of the social ladder”). They also measure what they call group-based anger, which is the affective dimension of group relative deprivation, with three items (e.g., “I feel angry when I think of Western countries’ foreign policies towards Muslim countries”). Finally, they measure violent behavior intentions using two items: “I am ready to do everything in my power to change Western countries’ foreign policy towards Muslim countries” and “I am ready to use violence against other people in order to achieve something I consider very important.” Using the group-based relative deprivation measure, they observe significant and positive correlations with violent behavior intentions in all studies. The other results are of the same type and thus support the authors’ hypotheses. More recently, a meta-analysis published in 2022 in Political Psychology assesses predictors of political violence among youth under the age of 30 (Jahnke et  al. 2022). Group-based relative deprivation is among the important factors according to this meta-analysis. The authors found significant and consistent associations between group-based relative deprivation and political violence in both cross-­ sectional and longitudinal studies. In sum, based on current knowledge, it seems that group relative deprivation plays a significant role in understanding and explaining political violence and terrorism. However, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that this proposition is in fact problematic.

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2  Theories of Intergroup Relations: Vicious Cycles Between “Us” and “Them”

 heoretical and Methodological Problems in the Study T of Relative Deprivation In the face of recent data, and taking into consideration that relative deprivation theory has long been considered as an explanation of political violence, one can spontaneously accept this proposition. However, upon closer examination, one comes to the conclusion that the thesis that collective relative deprivation leads directly to political violence does not hold. We will suggest that there are theoretical and methodological problems with the recent research conducted on relative deprivation, such as, for example, those of Obaidi et al. (2019). The Distinction Between Violent Radicalism and Nonviolent Activism  The first problem is that the conceptual difference between violent radicalism and nonviolent activism is not taken into account. Indeed, Wright et al. (1990) proposed a distinction, now well established in social psychology, between normative and nonnormative collective action (see also Martin et al., 1984). According to the authors, when a group engages in peaceful actions aimed at improving the group’s situation, we speak of normative collective actions. These actions respect the rules of democratic life. But it also happens that groups engage in actions that do not respect the dominant norms, by committing illegal acts or by acting in a destructive way toward goods and persons. These are, according to Wright et al. (1990), nonnormative collective actions. When we look at terrorism and violent radicalism, we are dealing with nonnormative collective actions. More recently, Moskalenko and McCauley (2009) have proposed a similar distinction between what they call activism and radicalism. Activism refers to supporting peaceful protests and thus to what Wright et al. (1990) refer to as normative collective action. Radicalism, on the contrary, involves supporting illegal and/or violent actions and thus nonnormative collective actions. Furthermore, Moskalenko and McCauley (2009) assess the empirical validity of this distinction in a series of research studies by developing a questionnaire measuring endorsement of activism and endorsement of radicalism. Factor analyses confirm that the items designed to measure activism and radicalism load on two distinct dimensions. Moreover, they observe a positive and significant correlation between the two scales: the more people support normative actions (activism), the more likely they are to also support nonnormative actions (radicalism). Subsequent research has confirmed these findings (see Adam-Troian et  al., 2021; Fodeman et  al., 2020). Yet, studies such as Obaidi et al. (2019), claiming that group relative deprivation explains radicalism, do not take into account this distinction between activism and radicalism. This raises serious questions because there is considerable research evidence of a link between group-based relative deprivation and activism, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. If, in addition, activism is considered to be positively related to radicalism, this means that there is an alternative to the proposition that group-based relative deprivation explains radicalism. It can be hypothesized that group-based

Theoretical and Methodological Problems in the Study of Relative Deprivation

29

relative deprivation explains activism, not radicalism, and that it is because activism is related to radicalism that a relationship between group-based relative deprivation and radicalism is observed. In other words, the methodological implication of the distinction between activism and radicalism is that in order to study the relationship between group-based relative deprivation and violent radicalism, one must necessarily control for the role of activism and ensure that the observed relationships remain the same regardless of the level of activism of participants. No research to our knowledge has taken these basic methodological precautions. For those familiar with research on the group-based relative deprivation, it is clear that this variable plays an important role in explaining collective actions in a democratic framework. Let us take as an example of democratic actions, voting in an election or a referendum. We know that the group-based relative deprivation plays a significant role in this respect. For example, Abrams and Grant (2012) showed that in the last referendum for Scottish independence, group-based relative deprivation was a significant predictor of voting for independence. Similarly, but in a completely different context, Urbanska and Guimond (2018) showed that in the 2012 presidential elections in France, the feeling that the French are treated worse than immigrants (i.e., group-based relative deprivation) was a significant predictor of the intention to vote for Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the extreme right. One only has to look at what Marine Le Pen publishes on Twitter to see that she is indeed playing on this feeling of group-based relative deprivation. For example, she tweets on February 24, 2019, “Is it normal that a freshly arrived #immigrant gets more than a French pensioner who has worked all his life?” In other words, the links between group-based relative deprivation and normative political actions are important, while those between relative deprivation and violent political actions may be spurious. They arise simply from the fact that radicalism and group-based relative deprivation have in common to be related with activism. The research of Fodeman et al. (2020) helps to illustrate the theoretical and methodological importance of the distinction between activism and radicalism. They examine the relationship between converting to Islam and radicalism. There is ample evidence to suggest that recent converts to Islam are often the most involved in terrorist attacks. However, Fodeman et al. (2020) find that converts are no more radical than non-converts when activism is taken into account. In other words, converts are more likely to be activists regardless of their level of radicalism, but the reverse is not true. However, Fodeman et al. (2020) do not examine the role of relative deprivation in this context, and thus the question remains. Therefore, in Part II, Chap. 4 will present new research evidence to address this gap in existing knowledge. After considering relative deprivation theory and other important theories of social psychology, it is time to consider the role of political factors that we have simply alluded to so far. In the next chapter, we turn to the consideration of some new ideas related to the development of a political psychology of violent radicalism.

Chapter 3

Politics and Domestic Terrorism: Building a Diverse Democracy

In politics too there are rules, written in constitution and carved out by tradition and precedent. These rules, embodied by political institutions, allow rivals to engage in fierce debate and hash things out without resorting to bloodshed (Van Bavel and Packer 2021, pp. 32–33).

What kind of policy should be developed to deal with Islam in Western countries? What kind of world do we want? It turns out that we do not all agree on this. In high power distance cultures, such as Malaysia (Hofstede 1980), people believe that the best society is made up of a group of rulers and deciders who have the best positions because they are important and a group of followers who obey. This type of hierarchical system is seen as ideal because it get things done and society functions smoothly. People may willingly subscribe to it (Guimond et al. 2007). But in low power distance cultures such as the USA or Canada, people believe that the best society is one where there are limited power inequalities such that everybody can be a bit of both, rulers and followers. Aspirations for an ideal society are powerful shakers and movers. Behind Jihadi-inspired terrorism is the dream of establishing a new kind of society. As suggested by Reicher and Haslam (2016): “Both al Qaeda and ISIS deploy this strategy. A large part of their appeal to sympathizers is that they promote terror for the sake of a better society (…) an idealistic caliphate, which would unite all Muslims harmoniously” (p. 6). Age is one of the most consistent factors to come up in reviews of studies looking at factors associated with radical movements. Terrorists are almost without exception young people aged between 20 and 35 years old (Desmarais et  al., 2017; Khosrokhavar, 2015). Why? We are not aware of any empirically validated explanation for this, but we would suspect that idealism and the willingness to fight for a new society that is more potent at a young age is probably involved. How can we resolve disagreements over the kind of society that people want? As indicated in the beginning quote, this is the basic function of political institutions. Political philosophers have spelled out the idea that the main goal of politics is to © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Guimond, A. Nugier, The Social and Political Psychology of Violent Radicalism, Peace Psychology Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46254-2_3

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3  Politics and Domestic Terrorism: Building a Diverse Democracy

avoid violence, to seek ways of living together without killing each other. Tavoillot and Riglet (2019) suggest that this can be done in three main ways: (1) using principles and moral values; (2) establishing the rule of law; and (3) managing power struggles through political means. Even without going into more details, one sense immediately that the occurrence of political violence must have something to do with some forms of breakdown in the operations of political institutions. By definition, terrorism is not a democratic mean of protest. Surprisingly, political psychology has not devoted much attention to those issues. The field is defined by Jost (2021) as being essentially the use of a psychological approach to study political ideology that itself is defined (quoting Erickson and Tedin, 2019) as “a socially shared system of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved” (Jost 2021, p. 226). Thus, the essence of political ideology has a lot to do with the kind of society that we look for (“the proper order of society”) and so is intimately related to potential clashes around that issue. While critically important, as a general perspective on political psychology, this approach is perhaps too psychological and not enough political. It is concerned with beliefs in the minds of individuals and does not say a word about political institutions, laws, or constitutional rulings that are important in politics. Another approach to political psychology is found in Social Dominance Theory (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999). This theory has been criticized by social identity theorists for being too individualistic, but unfairly because for the first time in a major approach to intergroup relations, we have a theory that discusses the role of institutions and policies, concepts that by definition go beyond individuals, and that are not even found in the social identity perspective (Guimond, 2023). More specifically, social dominance theorists distinguish between hierarchy-enhancing (HE) roles and institutions, those that seek to protect and enhance intergroup inequality and group-based dominance, and hierarchy-attenuating (HA) roles and institutions seeking, to the contrary, to protect and defend equality and the rights of the less powerful. Institutions such as the military, the KGB, the CIA, or the RG in France would be examples of HE institutions. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or any associations or social services helping people in need would be examples of HA institutions. In terms of concrete policies, the theory suggests specific criteria to determine if a policy is HE or HA, and we will come back to this below (see Levin et al., 2012). In this chapter, we will use this distinction between HE and HA policies to develop hypotheses about the role of political factors, such as national integration policies, in preventing, or to the contrary, fostering political violence. These hypotheses will be tested empirically in the context of the French secularism policy in the next chapter. The general idea is simple and important in the context of homegrown terrorism (King and Taylor, 2011). To understand the potential for political violence in Muslim-Western relations, it is critical to consider the integration of Muslims in Western societies (Nugier and Guimond, 2016). To the extent that Muslims find a place in the Western world and are well integrated, the potential for conflict is low. To the extent that Muslims are systematically excluded, discriminated against, and pushed to the margin of society, the more likely it is that they will look for other,

3  Politics and Domestic Terrorism: Building a Diverse Democracy

33

sometimes radical, options, and the potential for political violence will be high. This is the thesis that has guided much of the research that we have conducted over the last 15 years. It implies that political violence and terrorism are not purely individual psychological phenomena. They arise out of the relationships between social groups, and the political context must be taken into account. It should be clear by now that the type of social and political psychology that is being developed in this book differs in several ways from more classic or orthodox version. We are trying to break away from the individualistic approach that has dominated these areas for several decades. We now know that individualism is in large part a product of our Western culture (or what is now called our WEIRD psychology, Muthukrishna et al., 2020). When Hofstede (1980) identified individualism (as oppose to collectivism) as a cultural dimension, he found that this was a characteristic of all western democratic countries such as the USA, Canada, Germany, France, the UK, and so on. In contrast, his 53-country study revealed that countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa were largely collectivist, not individualist. Sure enough, subsequent research has shown that this has important implications for how we explain human behaviors (see Guimond, 2010). Individualists tend to favor individualistic explanations focusing on personal characteristics of the individual as the cause of behavior. This will occur even when everything is pointing to the role of strong situational constraints, a tendency labeled the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977). This applies of course to scientists, scholars, and researchers from individualist cultures who are humans too. While this tendency was taken at first as a universal law of social cognition, research in collectivist countries dispelled that myth. Far from following the fundamental attribution error, people from collectivist cultures, as they get older, increasingly take into account the situational context in explaining behaviors. When looking at research on terrorism, it is not surprising to find that “Across the empirical articles, this review revealed a predominance of work focused on individual factors associated with terrorism” (Desmarais et al., 2017, p. 195). This may reflect at least in part an individualist orientation. We wish to contribute to a greater recognition of the critical role played by contextual factors. To this end, we examine below research on national policies designed to manage cultural and religious diversity and spell out their role in creating a context that legitimizes (or not) intergroup conflicts and violence, deriving specific hypotheses that will be tested empirically in Part II. This chapter will deal with topics that are sensitive, especially in France, but as there are important scientific research in this area, it needs to be discussed in a nondogmatic way. We start by showing that there are important variations in the level of integration of Muslims in various western countries. We then show how this variation can be explained by the type of national policy and traditions that is typical of a given country. The fact that these policies can increase or decrease prejudice and discrimination against immigrants in general and Muslims in particular will be documented. The direct implications for terrorism and political violence come from more recent studies showing that among Muslims in the West, those who feel discriminated against are more likely to support terrorism and political violence (see Gomez et al., 2022).

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3  Politics and Domestic Terrorism: Building a Diverse Democracy

Muslim-Western Relations Across 15 Countries In 2006, the Pew research center published the results of a series of international polls including for the first time a comparative study of Muslims in Europe. A total of 16,710 adults in 15 countries were interviewed, including oversamples of Muslims in 4 European countries on which we will focus: France, Germany, Spain, and the UK. The study was conducted in the wake of the London bombing of July 7, 2005, and the controversial cartoon portrayal of Muhammad in September 2005. These cartoons, first published in a Danish paper, generated condemnations by Pakistan and Turkey as being offensive and disrespectful of the beliefs of Muslims, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets in the Muslim world to express their anger. Even in London, The Guardian reports that “More than 500 people, led by the extremist group al-Ghuraba (…) marched to the Danish embassy in Knightsbridge carrying banners calling on Muslims to ‘massacre’ those who insult Islam” (https://www. theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/04/muhammadcartoons.pressandpublishing). Figure 3.1 indicates the views of these events as reflecting “Muslim intolerance” versus “Western disrespect,” across a range of countries. Without surprise, solid majorities in all Western countries view this as a sign of Muslim intolerance (60% in the USA, 67% in France), whereas in Muslim countries, there is almost unanimity to blame Western disrespect (90% in Jordan, 84% in Turkey). Muslims in western countries clearly side with the latter group of countries in blaming Western disrespect. In its special issue of February 8, 2006, the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo published the same cartoons in solidarity with Denmark. The newspaper justified this action by stating that “Charlie Hebdo attempts to analyze the controversy and its consequences. The aim is to show that freedom of expression must be stronger than intimidation.” Much later, on January 7, 2015, in Paris, it was ostensibly for this action that the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks occurred (see Nugier and Guimond, 2016). Two heavily armed Paris-born men, Saïd and Cherif Kouachi, entered the building where the journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were in an editorial meeting. They shot and killed all 12 of them. The Kouachi brothers were themselves killed by the police 2 days later, on January 9. During this very period, we were conducting an experiment in our laboratory in Clermont-Ferrand, 400 km from Paris, studying the effects of cultural norms and worldviews on attitudes toward Muslims and perceived threat. We were able to include this terrorist attack in the experimental design, as a naturally occurring independent variable, allowing us to examine the causal effect of terrorism (see Anier et al., 2019; Nugier et al., 2016). These results, and additional survey evidence with data from a representative sample of the French population (Lueders et al., 2023), are discussed in Chaps. 5 and 6, as they provide unique insights into how people react to terrorism and why they react that way. But to understand this discussion, it is necessary to understand the political context and the factors that play a role in shaping this context. The Pew data are important for that.

Muslim-Western Relations Across 15 Countries

35

Controversy over Cartoons of Muhammed: What's to blame ?* Muslim intolerance U.S France Great Britain Spain Germany Russia French Muslims Spanish Muslims British Muslims German Muslims

Western disrespect

60

20

67 59 53 62 34

28 19 21 26 30

19 5 9 15

79 80 73 71

4 3

Jordan Egypt Indonesia Turkey

5 8

90 87 86 84

Nigerian Muslims Nigerian Christ.

6 63

81 22

India

33

53

Fig. 3.1  “Muslim intolerance” versus “Western disrespect”? Responses (Percentage) across a range of countries. *Based on those who heard about the controversy. (Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project survey 2006)

First, the data clearly shows that in 2006 (but not necessarily now), French Muslims were better integrated and more likely to feel accepted than was the case for Muslims in the UK, Germany, or Spain. Figure  3.2 displays the percentage agreeing that there is no “conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.” Among non-Muslims, the only western country where the majority agrees is France with 74%. Among Muslims, the western country where the majority agrees is also France with 72%, Spain being a close second with 71% agreement. But in Spain, Muslims face a majority who believe that there is a problem with being a devout Muslim, whereas this is not the case in France. Furthermore, Fig.  3.3 indicates that whereas 81% of British Muslims define themselves as “Muslim First,” and only 7% define themselves as citizen of their

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3  Politics and Domestic Terrorism: Building a Diverse Democracy

Is there a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society? No conflict U.S

Yes, conflict

42

40

France Great Britain Spain Germany Russia

74 35 36 26 30

26 54 58 70 56

French Muslims Spanish Muslims British Muslims German Muslims

72 71 49 57

28 25 47 36

Pakistan Jordan Egypt Indonesia Turkey

17 63 70 52 60

47 34 28 43 29

Nigerian Muslims Nigerian Christ.

64 34

41 41

Fig. 3.2  Percentage of persons agreeing that there is “no conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society”. (Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project survey 2006)

country, there is a solid 42% of French Muslims who define themselves as citizen first. The same question among non-Muslims reveals that the country with the largest percentage of people who define themselves as citizens first is France with 83%. In other words, for both Muslims and non-Muslims, France stands out as the country where the population is more likely to self-categorize as a “citizen” rather than as a member of a religious group. Finally, do Muslims in the West seek to be “distinct from society,” or do they seek to “adopt national customs”? Figure 3.4 indicates again that for both Muslims and non-Muslims, the largest percentage of people who select “adopt national customs” is France with 78% and 46%, respectively. Said differently, French Muslims are much more likely than Muslims in other western countries to want to adopt national customs and assimilate to the majority culture, and it is also in France where Muslims are more likely to be perceived as wanting to do so. Clearly, at that time, Muslims/non-­Muslims relations in France seemed to be running smoothly, and much more so than in

Muslim-Western Relations Across 15 Countries

37

What do you consider yourself first ? A citizen of your country Muslims in ... France Great Britain Spain Germany Pakistan Jordan Egypt Indonesia Turkey

42 7

Muslim/Christian first

46 81

3

69

13

66

6

87

21

67

23

59

39

36

19

51

Nigeria

25

71

Christians in ... U.S.

48

42

France Great Britain Spain Germany Russia

83

14

59

24

60

14

59

33

63

16

Nigeria

43

53

Fig. 3.3  Percentage of Muslims/Chistians who describe themselves as “Muslim/Christian First”. (Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project survey 2006)

Germany, the UK, or Spain. As will be seen later on, this context in France can be directly related to an explanation of the reasons why the reaction of the French population to the Charlie Hebdo attacks was so different from the aftermath of terrorist attacks in the USA, the UK, Germany, or Spain. However, before that, it is critical to understand why France stands out as so different from other Western countries in Pew (2006). How can we explain these Pew (2006) results? Ersanilli and Saharso (2011) give us a clue by asking: “What role do national integration policies play?”

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3  Politics and Domestic Terrorism: Building a Diverse Democracy

Muslims in your country mosly want to ... Adopt national customs Be distinct from society U.S

44

33

France

53

46

Great Britain

64

22

Spain

67

21

Germany

76 17

Russia

69

French Muslims

21

78

Spanish Muslims

27

53

British Muslims

35

41

German Muslims

52

30

India

48

43

10

Fig. 3.4  Perception of Muslims who want to remain distinct from the larger society or to adopt national customs (in percentage). (Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project survey 2006)

National Models of Integration Since 2008, we have conducted research on national integration policies in Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the USA that can explain much of what is coming out of the Pew data (for overviews, see Guimond et al., 2014; Guimond, 2019). Using both objective indicators (e.g., the existence of specific laws) and subjective ones (shared beliefs in the population), it is possible to distinguish between three main national policies: assimilation (strong in Germany), multiculturalism (strong in Canada, moderate in the USA and the UK), and universalism (strong in France, Guimond, 2019; Koopmans et al., 2005). Table 3.1 summarizes some of the ways in which these policies can be distinguished.

39

National Models of Integration

Table 3.1 Distinctions between three responses towards diversity and their associated national policy Policy Assimilation Universalism (color blind) Multiculturalism

Response towards diversity Reject (negative)

Principle of categorization Recategorization

Ignore (neutral)

Decategorization

Celebrate (positive)

Salient Categorization

Country Germany, U.S.A. France Canada, Australia

Adapted from Guimond (2019)

Universalism  The French citizenship model has a long history going back to the revolution and is embodied in the motto “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” (freedom, equality, brotherhood) engraved on every French public building (Kamiejski et al., 2012). It is structured around the principle of equal rights for citizens, regardless of origin, race, or religion. Republican universalism differs both from a multiculturalism policy that explicitly promotes cultural diversity and from an assimilationist policy that aims to reduce this diversity (Guimond et  al., 2014). The basic value underlying universalism is colorblind equality, and thus this model, in principle, seeks to avoid categorization based on ethnicity, race, or religion, a principle known as decategorization (Guimond, 2019). As Laborde (2001) puts it: “Cultural differences are unimportant in the face of the essential unity of mankind, which demand that individuals be respected “sans distinction d’origine, de race ou de religion” (…) This culture-blind understanding of equality permeates French republican philosophy and still informs public policy” (p. 719). This explains why the concept of citizen (citoyen in French) has been imbued with values in a manner that can be difficult to understand outside of France. For example, in a study published in 1952, Wally Lambert from McGill University in Montreal was surprised to find striking differences between French participants and American participants in their response to questions about accepting somebody else as citizen, with the French thinking that this was a much more important issue than the Americans. This comes out obviously in Pew (2006) where, as noted above, both Muslims and non-Muslims are more likely to self-categorize as “citizen first” in France than in the UK, Germany, or Spain. Another central feature of the French policy that explains the Pew (2006) results is that unlike any other models in Western democratic countries, the French model is designed to deal not only with cultural diversity but also with religious diversity. The central concept here is the French word “laïcité” that can be roughly translated as secularism, although this is not exactly the meaning of the term (see Baubérot and Milot 2011). The French policy of secularism was established by the law of 1905 enacting the separation between Church and State in order to ensure freedom of conscience. With this law, citizens in France have the right to believe, or not to believe, and thus to express publicly their religious beliefs or their atheism. To guarantee the equality of respect toward all citizens, the State is to remain neutral with regard to people’s faith. In order words, in France, the State is secular, not the

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citizens (Lorcerie and Guimond, 2021). What the study of Pew (2006) reveals and what we found over more than 10 years of research on the French model is that there is a component of this policy that is highly effective in dealing with intergroup relations in general and Muslims/non-Muslims relations in particular. In developing an instrument to measure support for the principles underlying the French policy, we found indeed that one of the main components concern this dimension of colorblind equality (Kamiejski et al., 2012; Roebroeck and Guimond, 2015). Research has shown, through factor analysis, that this component can be identified among young students as well as among the adult population and that it is a strong predictor of lower levels of prejudice and discrimination against people of North African origin in France (Anier et al., 2019; de la Sablonnière et al., 2020; Guimond, 2023; Kamiejski et al., 2012; Roebroeck and Guimond, 2015, 2018). The Pew study indicates that French people are less likely than British, German, or Spanish people to believe that “there is a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.” If this is because of the influence of the French policy, one would expect that among a representative sample of the adult population in France, those who agree with that statement would be less likely to support the principles of the French model. Figure 3.5 presents data from 2011 that supports

Support for the principles of republican universalism

3.6 3.55

3.5 3.47

3.4

3.3 3.29

3.2

3.14

3.1

3

Strongly disagree

Disagree

Agree

Strongly agree

It is incompatible to live in modern society and to be a a muslim devout

Fig. 3.5  Mean scores of support for the principles of republican universalism (4 = strong support) according the participants’ perception of incompatibility between being a devout Muslim and living in modern society. (Source: IMERCI ANR Project, 2011–2015; n°ANR-11-FRQU-004-01)

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this prediction. The measure of support for universalism is a reliable six-item scale including items such as “French society is made up first and foremost of citizens, not of communities”; “It’s best to judge one another as citizens rather than members of an ethnic or cultural group”; and “It’s important to respect the equality before the law of all citizens, without distinction of origin, race or religion.” Participants respond using a 4-point scale: 1 = strongly disagree; 2 = disagree; 3 = agree and 4 = strongly agree. As indicated in Figure 3.5, those who strongly agree that being a devout Muslim is incompatible with modern society scored the lowest on our measure of support for universalism. Conversely, those who see no incompatibility at all between being a devout Muslim and modern society are indeed those who strongly support the principles of republican universalism. These results are consistent with the thesis that the Pew (2006) results suggesting strong differences between France and other countries in terms of Muslim integration reflect at least in part the role of the French policy of universalism. In other words, these results can be explained by the role of political factors, the fact that there is a policy of universalism in France not elsewhere and the fact that there is a policy of assimilation in Germany, not in France. Indeed, research on the effect of a policy of assimilation is also relevant here mainly because, according to Koopmans et al. (2005), the laws in Germany are consistent with a policy of assimilation and much more so than the laws in other European countries (viz., France, the UK, and the Netherlands). Assimilation and Multiculturalism  As a policy, assimilation seeks to create an homogeneous society by reducing ethnic or cultural diversity. Newcomers are expected to conform to the way of life of the majority and to leave behind their cultural heritage. This policy is usually contrasted with multiculturalism, a policy that originated in Canada in 1971 and that was later on adopted by other countries such as Australia or Sweden (Berry et al., 1977; Guimond, 2010). The main feature of a multiculturalism policy is the willingness to accept cultural and linguistic differences in order to create an inclusive society where every cultural groups, majority and minority, can participate on an equal footing. Contrary to assimilation, a policy of multiculturalism will define cultural diversity as a national asset and, thus, will encourage cultural minorities to maintain their cultural distinctiveness. In order to summarize research on the effects of these national policies, it is useful to distinguish the perspectives of majority group members and that of ethnic or cultural minorities. Perspectives of Majority Group Members  From the point of view of majority group members, the main question, already raised when the policy was implemented in Canada in 1971, is the extent to which multiculturalism could weaken or even destroy national cohesion and national identity by allowing minorities to develop their own identity and by imposing an almost infinite number of ethnic categorization (i.e., Polish-Canadians, Chinese-Canadians, and so on). Contrary to the claims of European politicians (Sarkozy, Merkel or Cameron, see introduction), research in Canada (Kalin and Berry, 1995) and the USA (Huo, 2003) indicate that when people identify strongly with an ethnic or racial subgroup (i.e., Blacks being proud of

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being Black), they identify even more strongly with the national superordinate group (i.e., Americans or Canadians), not less strongly. Identification with a subgroup facilitates or strengthen national identity. This contradicts the assimilationist point of view and supports the multicultural one (Guimond, 2010; Huo, 2003). Similarly, there is no evidence in Canada that supporting multiculturalism weakens an attachment to the nation. To the contrary, over the years, one of the main sources of pride in being Canadian has become the fact of having a multiculturalism policy (Guimond, 2019). These findings are consistent with social identity theory (see Chap. 2). People derives psychological benefit from their membership in a group to the extent that this group can be distinct and positive. A multiculturalism policy favors such a process, whereas an assimilation policy negates that opportunity by communicating to minorities that their ethnic group membership is of no importance. The second important question is whether a national policy such as multiculturalism can increase or decrease prejudice and discrimination on the part of the majority against ethnic and racial minorities. Because multiculturalism potentially implies an “essentialization” of ethnic groups, and an increased tendency to categorize people in (cultural) groups, and because social categorization is often held in social psychology to be the basic process leading to prejudice and ingroup bias, many observers suspect that multiculturalism could increase prejudice. Research again does not confirm these worries. When considering assimilation and multiculturalism as diversity ideologies, systems of beliefs about how group members should relate to each other, several meta-analyses including correlational and experimental findings provide clear results: support for assimilation is strongly related to increased ethnic prejudice, whereas support for multiculturalism is moderately related to lower levels of ethnic prejudice (Leslie et al., 2020; Whitley and Webster, 2019). These meta-analyses are useful to summarize the main points of a large number of independent studies conducted over the last 40 years: overall, assimilation is detrimental, and multiculturalism is beneficial for healthy intergroup relations. With improvements in the development of various measures of the actual policy existing in a given country, cross-national research using large representative national samples has also progressed in assessing the effects of multiculturalism and assimilation as policies (see, e.g., Schlueter et  al., 2013). It turns out, again contrary to the speculations of Sarkozy, Merkel, or Cameron, that in European countries where there is a policy that is close to multiculturalism, as measured, for example, by the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), the national population is more likely to display positive attitudes toward immigrants than in similar countries where the policy is close to an assimilation model (for a review, see Guimond, 2019). This is consistent with a smaller scale study comparing university students in four countries ranging from high in multiculturalism (English Canada) to medium (the USA and UK) and low (Germany, see Guimond et al., 2013). Canadian students displayed the most positive attitudes toward Muslims, and German students were the least positive, with American and British students being in between. Why? It was shown that as predicted, the perception of a national norm that supports diversity as a positive feature of the country is closely related to the actual policy in the

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country as classified by objective indices. Thus, the perceived multicultural norm was strongest in English Canada and weakest in Germany. In fact, in Germany and in the UK, the perceived assimilation norm was stronger than the perceived multicultural norm. This is consistent with our theoretical model suggesting that a national integration policy will have an impact of the national population to the extent that it succeeds in reinforcing or creating a relevant national norm (Guimond et al., 2013, 2014). Indeed, the perceived multicultural norm was shown to be predictive of (lower) prejudice and could account for country differences observed in this regard. In other words, people who perceive a strong multicultural norm (who tends to be found mainly in Canada because of the multiculturalism policy) are also those who express less anti-Muslim views. There are now an increasing number of studies suggesting that, as in Guimond et al. (2013), national policies and laws can shape the perceived national norm (the perception of how group members feel about an issue) without necessarily affecting personal attitudes (how the individual himself or herself feel about an issue). For example, Tankar and Paluck (2017) have shown in a longitudinal study that the supreme court decision regarding gay marriage influenced the perceived norm in America regarding gay marriage. For issues of cultural or racial diversity, this can be critical. Majority group members often perceive diversity and immigration as a threat. But this may have do to, not with diversity in and of itself, but with the normative and ideological climate surrounding diversity (see Guimond, 2019). Cognitive appraisal theories of stress and emotion make a distinction between threat and challenge. The same stressful situation can be appraised as threatening or as challenging (Tomaka et al., 1997). An assimilation norm may create a context leading to appraise cultural diversity as threatening, whereas a multicultural norm may lead to appraise the same context as a challenge. Perspectives of Minority Group Members  Research suggests that ethnic minorities and immigrants usually wish to keep their home culture alive and become part of the new society at the same time. They support overwhelmingly multiculturalism rather than assimilation (Guimond, 2010; Verkuyten, 2014). So much so, that they will be more likely to want to adopt the national customs to the extent that their own cultural distinctiveness is recognized. This follows directly from social identity theory and is supported by research (Guimond, 2019). Said differently, the worst way to get newcomers to adopt national customs is to enforce an assimilation policy. The Pew results for Germany displayed in Fig.  3.4 confirm this principle. German Muslims are the least likely to wish to adopt national customs (30%). The fact that British Muslims (41%) and Spanish Muslims (53%) are a bit higher is consistent with the fact that there is a least some moderate level of multiculturalism in these countries, in addition to an assimilation tradition (see Guimond et  al., 2013, 2014). This interpretation, that the results observed by Pew (2006) in Germany reflects at least in part the assimilation policy of Germany, is strongly confirmed by Ersanilli and Saharso (2011) who looked at the identification of children of Turkish immigrants with their country of settlement. Comparing Germany (assimilation), France

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(universalism), and the Netherlands (multiculturalism), they find that children identify significantly less with their country of settlement in Germany than in the other two countries. These results, obtained in a methodologically more solid study, quite clearly confirm those revealed by Pew (2006). Furthermore, Ersanilli and Saharso (2011) can trace these findings to the fact that German Turks feel less recognized than in other countries. They conclude: “This provides further support for the thesis that the lower settlement country identification of Turks in Germany is an effect of its more exclusionary integration policy” (p. 930). Thus, a national policy of assimilation may be detrimental to the integration of newcomers, whereas a national policy of multiculturalism or universalism may facilitate integration by increasing the tendency of newcomers, even as children, to identify with the settlement country. A look at research on the psychology of acculturation suggests that one factor that may explain why this is the case is the role of prejudice and discrimination. Berry et al. (2006) have proposed an influential model of acculturation to study the conditions under which immigrants are likely to be well-adapted to their new country. The model identifies four strategies of acculturation by using two questions that any individual who become in contact with a new culture must answer: (1) Do I want to maintain my identity and culture of origin? and (2) Do I want to develop important relationships with members of the new culture? For conceptual ease, when only yes or no answers are given to these two questions, we obtain the definition of the four acculturation strategies: assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization. “Assimilation” is defined by a no to the first question and a yes to the second one, whereas “integration” is defined by a yes to both questions. Thus, in this model, “integration” refers to a sort of bicultural orientation in which the individual identifies at the same time with his or her culture of origin and his or her culture of settlement. This is not the case for “assimilation” that implies the eventual loss of the heritage language and culture. “Separation” is defined by a yes to question 1 and a no to question 2. Finally, “marginalization” is defined by a no to both questions. This orientation usually signals serious problems of identity because the individual does not feel a sense of belonging with the culture of origin nor with the culture of settlement. Research using this model in a large variety of cultures suggest that immigrant groups usually display a clear preference for “integration” as a mode of acculturation which is one reason why a policy of multiculturalism can be of interest (Guimond, 2019). Moreover, individuals who adopt the “integration” orientation are usually better adapted psychologically to the new cultural setting (Berry et al., 2006). In contrast, those in a “marginalization” orientation usually display some signs of mental problems. Finally, there are always a number of newcomers that opt for the “separation” option that implies a lack of identification with the culture of settlement. Why? In their study of young immigrants from various backgrounds in 13 different countries, Berry et al. (2006) found that the extent to which these youngsters feel discriminated against plays a major role in shaping their acculturation orientation. There is now a growing body of research showing that, as a result of the

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discrimination that they perceive and experience, minority group members will distance themselves from the majority group (Badea et al., 2011; Berry et al., 2006; Guimond, 2019). The more they perceive discrimination, the more likely they are to opt for the separation option. This is consistent with the rejection/identification model of Branscombe et al. (1999). According to Branscombe et  al. (1999), when African Americans perceived themselves to be the victim of pervasive discrimination, there are two inter-related outcomes. Their psychological well-being and mental health is negatively affected and consequently, they look for the support of their group to cope with this stressful condition. As a result, their identification with their own racial group goes up. This model received strong empirical support. There is now a body of work suggesting that for ethnic or racial minorities, group identification brings important health benefits and that conversely, when identification and contact with ingroup members are not possible, sometimes because of an assimilation policy, the risk of serious mental health problems is increased (Guimond, 2019; Verkuyten, 2014). More recent research by Leszczensky et  al. (2020) looking at national identification among Muslim adolescents in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden provide evidence quite consistent with the above analysis. As a measure of national identification, they asked 15 years old students “How strongly do you feel British/German/ Dutch/Swedish?” (p. 6). Overall, they find that the more they perceive discrimination, the less these youngsters identify with their European nations, with an effect particularly important in Germany (see also Maxwell and Bleich, 2014). Moreover, they find that the results are very similar for Muslim immigrants and for non-­Muslim immigrants. They suggest that there is no support for the idea that “Islamic religion prevents Muslims from integrating because its practices are incompatible with mainstream European culture” (p. 1). In sum, although more research is needed, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the implementation of a strong assimilation policy, as right-wing and extreme-­ right wing parties often propose, would likely be associated with extremely adverse consequences. It can push minority group members who are proud of their origin to the margin and lead them to become advocates of a separation option. Implications for the Explanation of Political Violence  In the language of Social Dominance Theory (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999), an assimilation policy can be classified as a HE policy, whereas both multiculturalism and universalism can be classified as HA policies (see Wollast et  al. 2023). Indeed, social dominance theory suggests that a given policy can be classified as HE or HA to the extent that the effects of supporting this policy on relevant outcomes are appropriately mediated by social dominance orientation (SDO, Pratto et al. 1994). SDO is a highly robust measure of general support for inequality and group-based dominance. Research has shown that supporting assimilation increases prejudice against outgroups (e.g., immigrants, Muslims), and this effect is mediated by SDO (Guimond et al. 2013). Furthermore, supporting multiculturalism and supporting republican universalism are both related to a decrease in prejudice, and these effects are both mediated by SDO (Levin et al. 2012; Wollast et al. 2023). In sum, these and other research (see

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Guimond, 2019) suggest that an assimilation policy such as that in Germany and to some extent in many other western countries such as the UK or the USA can foster a context of tension in intergroup relations that will increase the probability of radicalization and political violence (see also Guimond et  al., 2010; Thomsen et  al., 2008). In contrast, a more inclusive HA policy can be an effective mean of increasing intergroup harmony and reducing the probability of radicalization and political violence. There is already some evidence in support of this analysis in the case of Islamist terrorism because not only is it clear that some national policies can increase prejudice and discrimination on the part of the majority group, but in addition, we know that when Muslims feel discriminated against, they are more likely to support terrorism and political violence. This comes out clearly from an analysis of the same Pew data conducted by Victoroff et al. (2012). Victoroff and colleagues found that, as expected, perceived discrimination predicts support for suicide bombing among large samples of Muslims in the USA and in Western Europe (France, Germany, the UK, and Spain). The relations are not strong but in the appropriate direction. Similar findings emerged in research dealing with the acculturation of immigrants and minorities (see Badea, 2023; Lyons-Padilla et al., 2015). For example, in the USA, Muslims who feel marginalized and discriminated against are more likely to support radical groups (Lyons-Padilla et al., 2015). Thus, it would appear that HA policies that reduce prejudice and discrimination against Muslims can reduce terrorism threat, whereas HE policies that increase prejudice and discrimination may increase the willingness to turn to political violence. Considering that as noted above, national integration policies can shape national identification with HE policies reducing it among minorities, the study of Tausch et al. (2009) is also relevant here. With a sample of 1000 British Muslims, they find that there is no significant relations between Muslim identity and the level of support for the 7/7 London bombings in 2005. This suggests that a policy such as multiculturalism that can increase pride in being Muslim will not necessarily increase general support for Islamist terrorism. On the other hand, they find that British identity is significantly and negatively related to support. This is consistent with our hypothesis that HE policies that reduce national identification among minorities are not appropriate in order to prevent political violence. Nevertheless, there is at present only indirect evidence in support of this analysis of the role of national integration policies. Consequently, in Part II, we examine and test empirically these hypotheses by looking at the effects of national policies as contributing on the one hand to a better understanding of Islamist radicalism (Chap. 4) and, on the other, in explaining also how the national population react to instances of real terrorist attacks, namely, the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris (Chaps. 5 and 6).

Part II

Research: The Stairway to Radicalization and the Collective Response to Terrorism

Chapter 4

Political Violence as a Last Resort: The Role of Group-Based Relative Deprivation

Blindness to differences may be ideal when it implies equality but intolerable when it is synonymous of ethnocentrism (Leyens 2006, p. 137).

In this chapter, we first present a new model of the role of group relative deprivation in the explanation of Islamist radicalism. This model received empirical support in a series of recent studies (see Guimond et al. 2023; Guimond et al., in press). It suggests that group relative deprivation predicts activism, not radicalism, and that other factors, such as the response of the state to the demands of activists, are critical to understand the transition from activism to radicalism. Consequently, in a second part, this chapter examines the role of national policies in decreasing, or to the contrary, increasing radicalism, focusing on recent empirical evidence related to the effect of the French secularism policy.

 hen and Why Are Muslims Likely to Support W Political Violence? There is a popular belief that Islam as a religion is inherently violent and that consequently, Muslims are more extremists than other people. That the association between “Muslim” and “terrorism” has become virtually automatic has been illustrated recently by Arnoult et  al. (2023) using the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al., 1998). In fact, many social scientists (e.g., Kepel, 2015) appear to share this belief, implicitly or explicitly. For example, whereas Olivier Roy (2007) argues that the radicalization of Muslims has social roots, the French political scientist Gilles Keppel suggests to the contrary that Muslims are more radicals, because Islam itself is radicalized (see Dubet, 2018; Kaya et al., 2023). Of course, looking at the holy book of Islam, it is easy to find indications that can be seen as © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Guimond, A. Nugier, The Social and Political Psychology of Violent Radicalism, Peace Psychology Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46254-2_4

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conducive to violent actions. The problem with this argument is that similar violence-prone messages can also be found in other religions. Thus, relying on sacred writings is not sufficient. More telling is whether a systematic comparison of Muslims and non-Muslims would reveal that Muslims are clearly more supportive of political violence than non-Muslims. Existing published research are not clear on that issue. There are surprisingly little systematic attempts at testing empirically the popular belief linking Muslims with greater radicalism. In psychology, most studies are conducted on samples of Muslims only, looking at factors associated with radicalism (e.g., Lyons-Padilla et al., 2015; Tausch et al., 2009). Although this is a reasonable research strategy, and these studies provided valuable information, by design they cannot answer the prior question of whether Muslims are inherently more radicals than non-Muslims. This is one reason that led us to conduct a series of studies to shed more light on this central issue. Our general research strategy was to examine the level of support for the use of political violence by Muslims and to compare the responses of random samples of Muslims and non-Muslims as a group. Three studies were conducted between 2018 and 2022 among 1459 French participants in total, coming from all regions of France. All studies were beforehand submitted for ethics approval and specific hypotheses relating to the 2022 study were preregistered on a public website. In Study 1, a preliminary study that served to develop our model, there are 41 Muslims and 169 non-Muslims, 27% males with a mean age of 31.8 years old (sd = 16.7). In Study 2, there are 307 Muslims and 304 non-Muslims, 39% males with a mean age of 43.4  years old (sd  =  15.02). In Study 3, there are 320 Muslims and 318 non-­ Muslims, 42% males with a mean age of 42.7 years old (sd = 15.8). Radicalism was examined at the level of attitudes and cognition, not behavior. Given that, according to recent reviews of the evidence, those who express some level of support for violence in their attitudes or intentions are indeed more likely to engage in acts of terror (see Wolfowicz et al., 2020), there is a least a minimal justification for this strategy although it has clear limitation. We are not in any way in a position to study actual terrorist acts, and this research cannot be understood as identifying causal factors underlying such acts. Rather, it must be seen as an attempt to understand the process of radicalization that can be linked theoretically as being conducive to violent actions. Religiosity Is Higher Among French Muslims  The first clear outcome of these studies is that in France, Muslims are found to be much higher in religiosity than non-Muslims as a group. This is true in terms of self-definition as a religious person which is much higher among Muslims but also in terms of religious practice. For example, we asked participants: Beside specific occasions such as weddings or funerals, do you often attend religious ceremonies? Among non-Muslims, religious practice is higher among Christians than among atheist or agnostic who represent more than 35% of the population in France. But even compared with Christians, Muslims report a much higher frequency of religious practice. These results are not necessarily surprising. They simply indicate that we are indeed comparing different religious groups and that one of them is clearly more religious than the other. Thus,

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if Islam as a religion is inherently linked with radicalism, we ought to observe that in our results. Here, the findings underscored the importance of distinguishing between activism and radicalism. As will be explained below, the main results would be completely different if we studied only radicalism, without considering activism. So, how did we measure radicalism and activism, and how reliable and valid are these measures? Measures of Activism and Radicalism  To measure activism, participants were asked to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statement reflecting their level of support for normative collective actions seeking to defend Muslim’s rights. Although the measures vary somewhat from study to study, typical statements include “One should be ready to take part in peaceful protest in support of minorities such as Muslims”; “I support political actions taken to improve the life of Muslims”; and “French Muslims should help their oppressed brothers and sisters in other parts of the world through dialogue and sensitization.” To measure radicalism, participants were asked to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statement reflecting their level of support for nonnormative collective actions seeking to defend Muslim’s rights. Typical items include “In general, I am supportive of Muslim groups who often resort to violence,” and “Muslims in France should help their oppressed brothers and sisters in other parts of the world through every means possible.” These measures were inspired from, and are similar to, those used in previous research (Adam-Troian et al., 2021; Obaidi et al., 2019; Lyons-Padilla et al., 2015; Tausch et  al., 2011; van Bergen et  al., 2015). Factor analyses showed that items purporting to measure activism loaded on a factor that is distinct from items purporting to measure radicalism, demonstrating construct validity. Thus, we know that these two attitude scales do not measure the same thing. However, and as expected on the basis of previous research (Adam-Troian et al., 2021; Fodeman et al., 2020; Moskalenko and McCauley, 2009), there is a significant and positive correlation between activism and radicalism (typically with r > 0.30). Those who support normative collective actions are also more likely to support nonnormative collective actions. This is expected because in both cases, the measure concerns group behaviors or collective actions. To make sure that one measure indicates the approval of violence but not the other, we examined the relationship of both scales with the following item, as validity criteria: “I condemn the violence perpetrated by certain Muslim groups.” As expected, the activism scale correlates positively and significantly with this item: the higher the score on the activism scale, the more the participants disapprove of violence perpetrated by Muslims. So, our measure of activism reflects support for nonviolent collective action. Conversely, the radicalism scale correlates negatively and significantly with the validity criteria: the higher the score on the radicalism scale, the less the participants disapprove of violence perpetrated by Muslims. So, our measure of radicalism effectively reflects support for violent collective actions. We thus made systematic comparisons of the scores of Muslims and non-Muslims participants on the scale of activism and on the scale of

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radicalism, with and without the alternative measure as a covariate. The results are clear: in France, Muslims support normative or peaceful collective actions on behalf of Muslims more than non-Muslims, regardless of whether we control for their level of radicalism. But the reverse is not the case. Muslims are more likely to support violent collective actions compared to non-Muslims only when we do not control for their level of activism. When we statistically control for the level of activism (higher among Muslims), the between-group difference on radicalism disappears and becomes nonsignificant. In sum, in this series of studies, we repeatedly failed to find support for the belief that Muslims are inherently more radicals than non-Muslims. Because France is home to the largest Muslim community in Western Europe, these results are important. Although this is contrary to many analyses, there are other data pointing in this direction. For example, Esposito and Mogahed (2006) find no significant differences in religiosity between moderate and radical Muslims with a sample of 9000 participants from 9 Muslim countries. The “radical Muslims” are not necessarily more religious. Importantly, in the present research, we reach this conclusion, because we considered both activism (support for normative collective actions) and radicalism (support for nonnormative or violent actions). Given that there is a known positive link between activism and radicalism (see Chap. 2), this means that methodologically, studies that consider only radicalism without considering activism may reveal misleading results. They may suggest that factor X is a potential cause of radicalism, whereas in fact, the results may be due to the role of activism that is confounded with radicalism. This is exactly the case, we submit, with recent research claiming that group relative deprivation is a root cause of radicalism (e.g., Obaidi et al., 2019, see also Chap. 2). A New Model of Group Relative Deprivation and Radicalism  What is the role of group relative deprivation, if any, in the radicalization process? We propose a new model in this regard that can integrate all past research, including those claiming that relative deprivation is a cause of political violence. Figure 4.1 displays a schematic representation of this Comprehensive Model of the role of Group Relative Deprivation in Radicalism (COMRAD). The model suggests first that when people feel unjustly deprived as a group, they do not suddenly become violent, contrary to previous research suggesting a direct link between group relative deprivation and Islamist radicalism. Rather, they Anger Group Muslim vs. Non-Muslim

Cognive GRD

Acvism

Radicalism

Contempt

Fig. 4.1  A Comprehensive model of the role of Group Relative Deprivation (GRD) in Islamic radicalism (COMRAD)

When and Why Are Muslims Likely to Support Political Violence?

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become more likely to support and participate in normative collective actions (activism). This is consistent with all the research in support of SIMCA (van Zomeren et  al., 2008) discussed in Chap. 2. When researchers started to move away from explanations of collective behavior based on egoistic relative deprivation (e.g., Crosby, 1976), they produced evidence suggesting that fraternal or group relative deprivation was a basic factor in the collective mobilization of all kinds of social movements, from the Quebec nationalist movement (Guimond and Dubé-Simard, 1983) to the movement for Scottish independence (Abrams and Grant, 2012), student protest (Dubé and Guimond, 1986), the Black power movement (Abeles, 1976), the antibusing movement in the USA (Useem, 1980), or the Yellow Vest movement in France (Lüders et al., 2021). These movements and many others are all democratic expression of the freedom of speech and the rights to protest in a liberal democratic regime. These protesters are activists, not terrorists. They support democracy and use normative democratic means of protests. Thus, the first point to note is that group relative deprivation is important for activism, not radicalism. The second point is that radicalism and terrorism will generally emerge out of the intergroup relations between activists and their opponents. This issue of the transition from activism to radicalism will be examined in the second part of this chapter concerned with the effect of national policies. There is a positive link between activism and radicalism and as a general rule, COMRAD suggests that most people who become radicals were activists first. There is a wide range of evidence consistent with this proposition (see the discussion about the terrorist Paul Rose in the introduction). In summarizing historical evidence concerning terrorist groups across different countries, Sageman (2017) writes: “One of the findings of the empirical chapters is that politically violent actors often did not originally view themselves as political. Many were students, workers, or citizens with some sort of grievance whose peaceful demonstration was violently repressed by the state” (p. 17). In studying converts to Islam who are known to have been involved in many terrorist attacks such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Fodeman et al. (2020) concluded that: “participation in nonviolent behaviors facilitates participation in violent ones” (p. 694). In other words, there is activism first, and under certain conditions, this activism is followed by more radical actions. This is the heart of the staircase model of terrorism proposed by Moghaddam (2005, 2018). To better understand terrorism, Moghaddam (2005) suggested that we need to think about a series of stairs that people climb with the top stairs leading to the terrorist act. According to Moghaddam (2005): “the vast majority of the people, even when feeling deprived and unfairly treated, remain on the ground floor” (p. 161). This is one of the main points of our proposed model: there is no direct link between group relative deprivation and radicalism (see Fig. 4.1). Without integrating such a stage-like process, current psychological explanations of terrorism are akin to the suggestion that terrorists are running through the stairs and jumping out of the window. This of course can and do happen. But this is not an accurate depiction of violent radicalism. The empirical results coming from our studies are consistent with COMRAD in suggesting a direct link between group relative deprivation and activism, not radicalism. Moreover, as noted above, our results can account for current published

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4  Political Violence as a Last Resort: The Role of Group-Based Relative Deprivation

data. Table 4.1 displays the results obtained by Obaidi et al. (2019). They suggest that group relative deprivation is “a key factor in explaining Western-born Muslims’ endorsement of extremism” (p. 1). In support of that claim, they showed in six studies a significant link between group relative deprivation and violent intentions among Muslims. Table 4.2 displays the results of our studies. Similar to Obaidi et al. (2019), we see the positive correlation between group relative deprivation and radicalism. However, partial correlations controlling for activism show that this relation disappears. These results support the model presented in Fig. 4.1 where group relative deprivation predicts activism and the link between group relative deprivation and radicalism is entirely mediated by activism (see Guimond et al. 2023). Our findings indicate that the link between group relative deprivation and activism stays the same, even when radicalism is statistically controlled for. Intergroup Emotions  As shown in Fig. 4.1, research on relative deprivation (see Chap. 2) also allows one to specify the relations between various components of relative deprivation and activism/radicalism. Current research on radicalism and political violence do not distinguish between various components of relative deprivation (see Obaidi et al., 2019; Lindström et al., 2023). COMRAD suggests that the cognitive and the affective components of group relative deprivation, in that order, mediate the effect of group membership (Muslims vs. non-Muslims) on activism. The cognitive component corresponds to the perception that the ingroup is deprived compared to the outgroup. It is associated with intergroup emotions, such as group-­ based anger, that are proposed, on the basis of previous research, to be the immediate or proximal cause of support for normative collective action. Thus, when people feel group-based anger, they support group mobilization. Table 4.1  Correlations between Group Relative Deprivation (GRD) and support for political violence in 6 studies Studies GRD

1. 0.44**

2. . 25**

3. 0.34**

4. 0.37**

5. 0.76**

6. 0.54**

Adapted from Obaidi et al. (2019) Note. ** p