XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

913

Radicalisation and the Rise of the Outsiders

RC56 Historical Sociology (host committee)

Language: English

The dispersion of political allegiances and ideologies away from the assumed centre consensus has caused considerable surprise and consternation across social science. Arguably part of the reaction is a consequence of how ill-informed disciplines such as sociology have been about the shifts of attitudes and behaviour of huge swathes of populations they claim to study.  Rather than identifying that creeping radicalisation was not restricted to religious extremists, sociologists appear to have complacently thought that the values of the established would continue to maintain the consensus.  History has shown that across the world, there have been deep rooted processes of radicalisation which have led to outsiders’ involvement in a range of actions from symbolic to actual violence. This session hopes to return to the belligerent roots of sociology in the application of contributions from figurational sociology to a range of forms of radicalisation. Possible areas for contributions include:

• Routes into, and in some instances through and out of, ideological, religious, pro state or nationalist forms of radicalism;
• Social processes that contribute to forms of radicalism or actions in its name;
• Habitus that enable outsiders to commit acts of violence and/or be willing to die for the cause;
• Constraints upon levels of mutual interdependence between radical outsiders and the established;
• Shifts in We/I balance that help understand new forms of radicalisation;
• Relationship between growing power differentials and the empowering of radical outsiders;
• The diminishing scope of mutual emotional identification, both within and between nation states;
• Processes of brutalisation and radicalisation