This articles discusses deradicalization attempts in religious educational settings. It closely examines the roots of religious radicalism and offers the deradicalisation models in religious educational institutions. The discussion contributes to the current scholarship on the role of religious education in deradicalization programs and how create an Islamic educational institution that corfims and applies principles of multiculturalism. The paper particularly addresses the roles of teacher, the curriculum aspect of learning, and the translation of multiculturalism into Islamic education. Managerial aspect (...) will be also included in the discussion. It further argues that the implementation of principles of multirculturalism reserves as an important element in confronting radical narratives, both from within and without Islamic tradition. It stands as an attempt to create moderate Muslim subjects who persistently uphold principles of inclusivity and transformative learning through opened-deliberation—rather than indoctrination—in education settings. (shrink)

Extremism is one of the most charged and controversial issues of the 21st Century. Despite myriad programs of deradicalization and prevention around the world, it remains an intractable and poorly understood problem. Yet it can also be regarded as a positive force - according to Martin Luther King Jnr., "the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be." In this much-needed and lucid book, Quassim Cassam identifies three types of extremism--ideological; methods; (...) and mindset extremism--and uses them to discuss the following fundamental topics and issues: What is extremism? What are the methods adopted by extremists? Is there an extremist 'mindset' and if so, what is it? What role do ideas of purity, victimhood and humiliation play in understanding extremism? How does extremism differ from fanaticism and fundamentalism? How does one become an extremist and how should we understand deradicalization? Throughout the book, Quassim Cassam uses many compelling examples, ranging from the Khmer Rouge, the IRA, Al-Qaeda, and Timothy McVeigh to Philip Roth's novel American Pastoral and counter-extremism programs, including the UK's 'Prevent' strategy. Clear-headed and engaging, Extremism: A Philosophical Analysis is essential reading for anyone interested in this important topic, not only in Philosophy but related disciplines such as Politics and International Relations, Conflict and Terrorism studies, Law, Education and Religion. It will also be of great interest to policy makers and those engaged in understanding extremism at any level. (shrink)

What happened to the feminist movement of the optimistic 1970s during the 1980s? Was it stifled by the political and economic changes associated with Thatcherism, or did it help bring those changes about? Will the 1990s see a new generation of feminists who will not tolerate the conditions under which their mothers work and live? Joni Lovenduski and Vicky Randall trace the movement's accomplishments and defeats over four successive Conservative governments. They argue that its development can only be understood in (...) the context of a rapidly changing social and economic environment and that the movement's deradicalization and apparent decline have in fact been accompanied by a greater involvement with state agencies and the growing presence of feminists in mainstream institutions. The central section examines five key areas for feminist politics: political representation and citizenship, equal employment opportunities, reproductive rights and health, motherhood and childcare, and male violence. For all of these it explores both the main preoccupations of feminist theory and important grass-roots developments. It concludes that a feminist-influenced British Women's Movement is a changed but unmistakably significant political force in the 1990s. (shrink)

Though a few scholars have discussed the transnational engagement of Caribbean thinkers with China, hitherto unknown is the imaginative alliance Left-wing Chinese writers crafted with the Caribbean via their works on the Haitian Revolution. This paper explores writings by four Chinese Marxists—Li Chunhui, Wang Chunliang, Lu Guojun, and Mao Xianglin—who engaged with Caribbean intellectuals, like Eric Williams, and used the history of the first anti-colonial revolution to rethink China’s own decolonial experiment. During the Maoist era, these thinkers argued for the (...) independence of the Haitian Revolution from the French Revolution, imagining Haiti’s revolutions as prefigurations of Third-World Revolution. In the deradicalized Deng era, these writers held contradictory stances towards capitalism, stressing how old and neocolonialism plundered Haiti. By reducing Sino-Caribbean relations to the Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean, or to the recent Belt and Road Initiative, scholars overlook lost revolutionary solidarities that aimed to dismantle world white supremacy. (shrink)

This article explicates the notion of doubt and the relationship of doubt to belief and conviction. It distinguishes three types of political virtue—leadership, systemic, and corrective—and considers whether doubt is a political virtue in any of these three senses. It is argued that while doubt is not a leadership virtue, it is a systemic and a corrective virtue. Specifically, it is potentially an antidote to methods, ideological, and psychological extremism. A distinction is drawn between extremism and forms of radicalism that (...) have resulted in social progress. It is possible for doubt to play a role in countering extremism without thereby also countering progressive radicalism. The concluding section develops a theory of deradicalization and identifies the role of radical doubt in deradicalization programmes. The proposed empirically informed account of deradicalization highlights the role of narratives in radicalization and deradicalization. (shrink)

The Marcusean concept of one-dimensionality is used to explore contradictions of organized labor. Since the original 1964 publication of One-Dimensional Man, the labor movement has suffered significant losses in membership and power. This essay examines the current relevance of Marcuse’s description of the increasing integration and collusion of organized labor with business, the loss of the union’s role as radical/revolutionary subject, and the containment of organized labor as an oppositional force. The specific mechanisms found in the structure, culture, logic, and (...) legal constraints that characterize the deradicalization of organized labor are critically reviewed. (shrink)

Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such experiences should (...) not be confused tout court with a broader and more complex phenomenon, such as extremism and politico-religious radicalism, but are a specific typology of that broader and multifaceted fact that is self-deception. We hypothesize that the self-deception implicit in experiences of intellectual distortion produces a cognitive dissonance of which the subject is normally, though with varying intensity, aware (or may become aware through honest introspection). The phenomenon occurs in two extreme forms: one is normal (sporadic), the other is exceptional (systematic). The passage from one to the other is a complex process of escalation and de-escalation, on which multiple external and internal variables act. In its ascending path, it essentially coincides with a process of psychological polarization and cognitive "de-pluralization", while its descending phase marks a return to reality and a "re-pluralization", where the subject returns to being what he basically is, namely, an active and tireless meaning seeker. In the central part of the chapter, similarities and differences between processes of deradicalization and phenomena of religious deconversion are analyzed, with reference, among others, to the case of the Austro-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. -/- An abridged version of this text has been delivered for the Workshop "Explaining Extreme Belief and Extreme Behavior", September 15-16, 2022, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I am grateful to David Konstan (NYU) for reading and commenting on a first version of this chapter and to Rik Peels (VUA) for his comments and questions during the Workshop. I would also like to thank my bachelor's and master's students at UDG, who discussed these topics at length with during semester 2022-B. (shrink)

Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such experiences should (...) not be confused tout court with a broader and more complex phenomenon, such as extremism and politico-religious radicalism, but are a specific typology of that broader and multifaceted fact that is self-deception. We hypothesize that the self-deception implicit in experiences of intellectual distortion produces a cognitive dissonance of which the subject is normally, though with varying intensity, aware (or may become aware through honest introspection). The phenomenon occurs in two forms: one is normal (sporadic), the other is exceptional (systematic). The passage from one to the other is a complex process of escalation and de-escalation, on which multiple external and internal variables act. In its ascending path, it essentially coincides with a process of psychological polarization and cognitive "de-pluralization", while its descending phase marks a return to reality and a "re-pluralization", where the subject returns to being what he basically is, namely, an active and tireless meaning seeker. In the central part of the chapter, similarities and differences between processes of deradicalization and phenomena of religious deconversion are analyzed, with reference, among others, to the case of the Austro-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. -/- An abridged version of this text has been delivered for the Workshop "Explaining Extreme Belief and Extreme Behavior", September 15-16, 2022, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I am grateful to David Konstan (NYU) for reading and commenting on a first version of this chapter and to Rik Peels (VUA) for his comments and questions during the Workshop. I would also like to thank my bachelor's and master's students at UDG, who discussed these topics at length with during semester 2022-B. (shrink)