Speaker: Nicolò Scremin, Research Fellow, International Security Program
Why do only a small fraction of individuals raised in similar settings, or exposed to broadly analogous dynamics, radicalize—and, at times, turn to violence—while the majority do not? This seminar addresses the longstanding “specificity problem” that has constrained radicalization and terrorism research for years, examining its empirical and practical implications, and assessing whether—and how—it can be overcome.
In the last two decades, unprecedented funding, expanded data access, and large-scale datasets on terrorism-related indicators created the expectation that increasingly sophisticated evidence would deliver predictive precision. Yet the theoretical payoff has been more limited. Across studies, the same conclusion recurs: radicalization is multifactorial, context-dependent, and mostly idiosyncratic, with patterns that appear coherent within particular cases or movements but rarely replicate elsewhere. Efforts at synthesis have often produced expansive inventories of risk and protective factors that describe correlates but do not explain how trajectories unfold, when thresholds shift, or why similarly situated individuals diverge so sharply. At the same time, qualitative research has generated rich biographical accounts, but less often in a form that permits systematic comparison of causal processes across life stages and social domains. The result is a fragmented explanatory landscape: broad models tend to flatten conditional complexity, while detailed narratives remain difficult to translate into cumulative theory.
The seminar presents doctoral research that addresses this explanatory gap by offering a mechanism-based account of extremist trajectories as conditional, time-dependent processes unfolding across socio-ecological domains. Drawing on life-history interviews with former extremists in North America and the United Kingdom, the study introduces an analytical framework that integrates meaning-making, temporal sequencing, and structural context within a single explanatory architecture. Rather than trying to predict who will radicalize, the analysis maps which recurring configurations of mechanisms become active, under what conditions, and with what effects—from entry and consolidation to fracture and exit. The findings suggest that many apparently unique stories are better understood as different instantiations of a shared set of underlying macro-grammars: a limited repertoire of recurring patterns, with variation in sequencing, layering, and switch points that steer trajectories in different directions. By making these patterns explicit, the project moves beyond static risk-factor lists toward a clearer, more testable way of examining extremist pathways.
Admittance is on a first come–first served basis. Tea and Coffee Provided.
