Rethinking Religion and Radicalization

Highlighting the relevance of deep contextual and comparative analysis, this open access volume offers new perspectives on how religious beliefs and frameworks intersect with the politics of violent radicalisation across different narratives, geographies and cultures. The role of religion and religiosity in processes of radicalisation to violence has been at the forefront of debates around terrorism and extremism for decades. The events of 9/11 gave new impetus to these debates, cementing assumptions about the role of Islam as the key driver for religiously inspired violent radicalisation, and defining the way in which radicalisation to violence is understood. The years since 9/11 have seen a striking diversification in the terrorist and violent extremist landscape, yet the treatment of how religious beliefs, concepts and histories are entangled with established and emergent violent ideologies and social movements has changed far less, impeding our understanding of how religious and ideological belief systems intersect and influence each other in different social, cultural, political and regional contexts. By looking beyond Islamist-inspired or attributed terrorism, this volume explores how violent extremists instrumentalise religion and religiosity in unexpected ways, from Orthodox Christianity and Hindutva to conspirituality, far-right extremism, and single-issue social movements. With contributions from range of regions and disciplines, this offers theoretically compelling and empirically rich new insights that speak to contemporary developments in the relationship between religion and violent extremism. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com