An ecological perspective for understanding radicalization processes. Insights from the French case

The phenomenon of jihadist radicalization has gained center-stage in public debates across Europe. A great deal of the media and scholarly attention has been devoted to the French case, not only because France has been hit by an impressive escalation of jihadist attacks in recent times, but also because it is the European country which has witnessed the highest number (in absolute terms) of young people leaving for Syria as “foreign fighters”. Indeed, contemporary “homegrown” jihadism arguably shows peculiar connections to francophone countries (McCants & Meserole, 2016). This spurred heated debates - within the French academic and policy-making communities as well the media and public opinion - around the motivations driving young people - who are overwhelmingly of immigrant descent - to adhere to jihadism, questioning the process of migrant integration and the treatment of Muslim minorities in francophone countries and in Europe more in general. One of the recurrent arguments in such debates traces the causes of the spread of jihadism in economic disadvantage and social marginalization, identifying the harsh life conditions of the “banlieues” as the main explanatory factor of this phenomenon. It is true that many Western – especially French – jihadist recruits are economic underperformers, often originating from poor and socially deprived areas. It is also undisputable that French public policies have failed in fostering the integration of its immigrants and are responsible for the marginalization that children of immigrants face. However, it appears that the lack of socio-economic integration, alone, can only partially explain the success of Jihadism (Mezzetti, 2016); more profound fractures linked to Muslims’ “symbolic integration” (Césari, 2015), i.e. how they are accepted and perceived by European receiving societies, better account for the success of this form of violent extremism. In particular, the depiction of Islam as incompatible with French presumed values or as the West’s “public enemy” build powerful symbolic barriers, hampering the full participation of Muslims into society and fuelling an exclusionary rhetoric of hate. The present chapter will seek to reconstruct how French public policies and discourses – encompassing France’s troubled colonial legacies - have come to shape such a fraught relationship with Islam and migration, identifying the reasons for the lack of such a “symbolic integration”. At the same time, this reconstruction needs to be complemented by an analysis of the processes by which jihadism has succeeded in imposing itself as a “plausible” alternative in the eyes of those who have become radicalized. Based on Latour's Actor-Network approach (2005), we contend that an ecological perspective is well-suited for grasping the appeal of the “jihadist endeavour”, whose “plausibility” emerges from the empirical analysis of a number of biographies and first-person accounts that we carried out. This allows us to disentangle apparently contrasting evidence: on one hand, identitarian cleavages occurring in European societies (e.g. in France or Germany), which result in the spread of Salafist countercultures (specularly reflected in the growth of fierce anti-Muslim sentiments); on the other, the inexistent or very low levels of religiosity frequently reported in the accounts of jihadists’ lives, which also include people with no Muslim or migrant background.