What Everybody Should Know about Radicalization and the DRIA Model

Thousands of monographs, reports, and articles about radicalization have been published since 2001. With the passage of time, the “scientific community” has come to identify some of them as “milestones.” Which are they? Unlike Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, who wrote an article in 2010 on what we know and what we don’t know about violent radicalization in Europe, the author here aims to present and discuss what everybody should know about the process of becoming radicalized. This article has four aims. The first is to present and discuss the most influential theories of radicalization leading to terrorism. This author attributes the milestones in radicalization research to the following scholars: Fathali M. Moghaddam, Silber & Bhatt, Marc Sageman, John Horgan, Quintan Wiktorowicz, Lawrence Kuznar, Clark McCauley, Sophia Moskalenko, Donatella della Porta, Arie W. Kruglanski, Jocelyn J. Bélanger, and Rohan Gunaratna. The second aim is to highlight the contribution of sociology, as an academic discipline, to the study of radicalization. To that end, the process of radicalization has been conceptualized here as a process of socialization or, more precisely, resocialization. The third aim is to present the DRIA Model of radicalization that is based on the lives of thirty-nine jihadi terrorists who succeeded in carrying out terror attacks in the West between 2004 and 2018. The fourth aim is to contribute to the debate over the “stagnation” – real or presumed – in radicalization research.