Conceptualizing Extreme Beliefs and Behaviors: Definitions and Relations

This book explores challenging conceptual issues in defining, analyzing, conceptualizing, and operationalizing notions such as extremism, radicalization, fanaticism, and terrorism. The focus is theoretical, but the work is empirically embedded. Rather than adding yet further definitions of phenomena like extremism, it seeks to make progress by addressing underlying conceptual issues. Specifically, it explores four crucial questions about extremism, fundamentalism, fanaticism, conspiracy theorizing, and terrorism. First, how should each of these extreme phenomena be defined in a fruitful manner, and what are the desiderata in seeking definitions of each of them? Second, how should the project of defining and conceptualizing these phenomena be undertaken: in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, or family resemblances, or insufficient but necessary parts of unnecessary but sufficient conditions, and based on datasets, or intuitions about particular cases, or common understandings in the public debate, or yet something else? Third, what is the role of normativity in defining these extreme phenomena, that is, the proper place of normative or even pejorative concepts and the normative framework of the researcher? Fourth and finally, how do the phenomena of extremism, fanaticism, fundamentalism, terrorism, and conspiracism relate to one another and to things such as apocalypticism, nationalism, cults, charisma, and state terror? This second volume in the Extreme Belief and Behavior Series lays the conceptual groundwork that the other volumes in the series will build on.