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My research has shown that extremist ideology describe an in-group based on race, religion or nationality, and they provide a parallel description of an opposing out-group. A movement becomes extremist when it believes the in-group can never be successful unless it is engaged in hostile activity against the out-group.
Extremists create a narrative justification for their beliefs by linking the out-group to a crisis afflicting the in-group, and linking the in-group to a violent solution against the out-group. The greater the perceived crisis, the more violent and extreme the solution. These linkages are the substance of an extremist ideology, and as such, they are
vulnerable to counter-programming.
The sweeping absolutes preferred by politicians are ill-suited to this task, whether the Bush administration’s efforts at
democracy promotion, the Obama administration’s efforts to
discredit the religious legitimacy of groups like IS, or May’s assertion of the “superiority of British values”. Democracy promotion, in the form of the Iraq war, created a zone of instability that extremists enthusiastically exploited. Simplistic attacks on legitimacy are, at best, ineffective, and at worst, risk fueling an escalation in extremist views (
as argued at length here). And asserting a competing identity may enhance the in-group/out-group dynamic, or worse, create
competing extremist movement.
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, white phosphorous isn't illegal, it's not being dropped, the SDF aren't Kurdish, nor is the YPG the military wing of the SDF. Quality journalism.
