Causes of Radicalism
In his essay in The Cairo Review of Global Affairs titled “The Problem with Radicalism”, the American-Turkish scholar Omer Taspiner stated that both ideology and economy are important to explain the causes of radicalism:
The question about the root causes of radicalism has generated a very polarized and so far inconclusive debate. Generally speaking, two major views have emerged. In one camp, there are those who see ideology, culture, and religion as the main drivers of radicalization. In the opposing camp, social and economic factors such as lack of education, unemployment, and absence of upward mobility trump other causes. The correlation between deprivation and radicalism is strongly rejected by the first group focusing on ideology for a simple reason: most terrorists are neither poor nor uneducated. In fact, the majority of terrorists seem to come from middle class and ordinary backgrounds. Terrorism is therefore almost exclusively perceived as a “security threat” with no discernible socioeconomic roots or links to deprivation. As a result, while the second group wants to prioritize development, education, and good governance to struggle against radicalism, the first group defines the fight against terrorism as a security issue with a single-minded focus on ideology.
Offering another nuanced view, the famed sociologist Manuel Castell observed that ‘identity’ is very important in a ‘network society’ of this twenty first century:
Let’s say, the global capitalist network, left to itself, will include in the network companies, countries, regions, people, that enhance the value of this network in money-making terms. This is an extreme situation, but it’s not completely away from what’s happening in the world.
Then, people who don’t have this value, don’t have the education, don’t have the infrastructure, don’t have the institutions, what do they do? They cannot live without these networks which provide them with everything and capture any wealth from anywhere through processing everywhere. At the same time, if they cannot actually contribute to these networks, they are switched off. So we observed two sorts of reactions. Some people in some countries, in some regions, are saying, “Well, if you don’t value me as a producer of bananas, I’ll produce cocaine, and then I become part of the cocaine network, and then what I do is smuggling; or I sell women and children,” and that goes into the so-called perverse connection.
The global criminal economy is a new phenomenon. It’s interconnected throughout the world. And at this point, it’s equivalent, more or less, according to the IMF, to about $1.5 trillion in the world, which is about the GDP of the United Kingdom. So, that’s one reaction.
The other reaction is to say, “Wait a second. If you exclude me, in terms of your values, from your network, I exclude you.” What I call the exclusion of the excluders by the excluded. And then they say, “You may be very rich and very technologically advanced, but I have gut. And my gut is better than your money, and that’s different.” Or “I have my historically rooted ethnic identity. I am a Chiapas Indian. As a Chiapas Indian, I don’t care about your North American Treaty of Free Trade, because you will have to acknowledge me, or I will die for it.
Specific to Indonesia, the causes related to radicalism has been elaborated in the paper ‘Building Religious Harmony through Economic Empowerment and Public Goods’. Solutions are also offered in the paper, which can be effectively summed-up in the name of Muhammadinah, which can be short for ‘Muhammad di Madinah’, as well as a renewed version of Muhammadiyah or Muhammadiyah 2.0.
(Next….)
