How Does an Extremist Think?

• One of the most dangerous pathways to extremism begins when individuals are reduced to their religious or social identities and held collectively responsible for the actions of others, regardless of their personal histories or conduct.
• An extremist may have known a victim as a neighbor or friend for decades, yet disregard everything learned through that relationship when a preconceived image of the victim’s community becomes more powerful than direct personal experience.
• Extremism reaches its most dangerous point when killing is redefined as a moral duty, revenge as justice, and violence against innocent people as a legitimate defense of a cause.
• Perpetrators of violence may preserve a positive moral image of themselves by blaming victims for their suffering, invoking a higher authority to justify their actions, or interpreting cruelty as evidence of commitment.
• One of the paradoxes of extremist violence is that perpetrators may fully recognize their victims’ humanity and capacity to suffer, while regarding that very awareness as essential to the punishment they believe they are delivering.
• Groups can provide individuals with a sense of worth, status, and belonging. Violence may consequently become a means of demonstrating loyalty and gaining recognition, making withdrawal a threat to an individual’s standing within the group.
• Extremist beliefs gain further strength when a group monopolizes the interpretation of reality, treats doubt as betrayal and disagreement as weakness, and rewards those who adopt increasingly uncompromising positions.
• Holding extremist beliefs and engaging in violence represent distinct processes. The transition from conviction to action depends on personal and social pathways, opportunities, and decisions that make violence appear acceptable to the individual.
• The attack on Hamoud Church in Karak raises a question extending beyond the crime itself: How can someone deliberately target people gathered to mourn a loved one, and how does their religious identity become, in the perpetrator’s mind, sufficient justification for taking their lives?
• National security extends beyond protecting citizens from violence to guaranteeing their equal rights to belonging and safety. Citizenship is ultimately tested by whether individuals can practice their faith, express differences, and rely on institutional protection, regardless of the size or influence of their communities.

The title “How Does an Extremist Think?” risks a degree of oversimplification if it presupposes a single mindset or a fixed personality that can be identified by appearance, education, or social background. Pathways into violence are diverse, as are the relationships between belief and practice within them. A more precise question, therefore, concerns the process through which an act of aggression comes to be seen as possible, acceptable, and ultimately necessary by a particular individual. In this process, the image of the victim, the meaning attached to the act, and the authority believed to have the right to judge it may all change.

Social Categorization and the Limits of Personal Knowledge

One such transformation begins when identity shifts from a social bond into a basis for distributing innocence and guilt. The danger emerges when a single identity comes to explain the entirety of a person, so that presumed beliefs outweigh actions and group membership outweighs personal history. Social identity and self-categorization approaches help explain how individuals’ perceptions of themselves and others change according to the group that becomes salient in a particular situation, and how categorization can shape treatment even when personal knowledge is limited. Explaining the transition from such bias to violence, however, requires additional factors.

In their 1994 study, “Self and Collective: Cognition and Social Context,” John Turner and his colleagues distinguish personal identity from social identity as two levels of self-definition. The former concerns what differentiates an individual from others; the latter concerns the individual’s understanding of belonging to a category whose members share characteristics and norms. Which level becomes most salient depends on the context of comparison. When a comparison between two groups becomes the principal means of interpreting a situation, the characteristics attributed to each group move to the foreground of perception and judgment. This account explains the shifting nature of categorization and how a particular social relationship can make one affiliation more influential than others at the same moment.[1]

A 1983 study by Turner and two colleagues on social categorization, interpersonal attraction, and group formation provides an experimental perspective on this relationship. The experiment involved eighty schoolchildren and was designed to separate the effects of categorization from those of personal preference. It found that assigning participants to categories, even on an arbitrary basis, could produce favoritism toward members of the same category. The finding also defines the limits of what can be inferred: categorization can influence how people treat others without a long history of personal relationships, while an explanation of enduring hatred or violence requires evidence beyond the conditions of this experiment.[2]

The decisive shift occurs when belonging is converted into responsibility. An individual may be made to bear the burden of a decision taken by a state, a crime committed by an organization, or a historical event simply because that individual shares the perpetrators’ religion or origin. The unit of accountability then changes: the individual is judged as a representative of a group, while the group is assigned a single personality, a single intention, and a continuous history of actions. What the victim actually did becomes a secondary consideration because judgment has already been passed before the person’s conduct is examined.

This is why the quality of relationships between groups matters beyond their mere existence. Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp’s extensive review indicates that intergroup contact generally reduces prejudice, with conditions such as equality, cooperation, and institutional support strengthening its effects.[3] This finding raises questions about the kinds of relationships a society cultivates. Do people interact as equal partners with shared rights and interests? Do their experiences allow them to reconsider the judgments they hold about one another? Neighborly relations can generate rich personal knowledge, and their effect is strengthened when supported by public rules that protect equality.

In their 2006 meta-analysis, Pettigrew and Tropp synthesized the findings of 515 studies encompassing 713 independent samples. The strength of this design lies in its capacity to estimate the general direction of the relationship across numerous studies and contexts. They found that intergroup contact is generally associated with lower prejudice, and that its effects may extend beyond the individuals directly involved to the wider group. The finding gains strength when supported by more rigorous research designs, which help examine the possibility that people who are already less prejudiced may be more willing to engage in contact in the first place.

The review also examined the established conditions of contact theory, including equal status within the situation, common goals, cooperation, and support from authorities or social norms. Bringing these conditions together strengthened prejudice reduction, although contact could have positive effects even when they were not all present. The finding concerns prejudicial attitudes as measured in the studies. Preventing armed attacks or explaining an individual’s decision requires separate investigation. The study thus provides a basis for evaluating the quality of shared relationships while leaving the question of violence open to other factors.

Moral Justification and the Permissibility of Harm

Another transformation involves reconstructing moral justification. Through his concept of moral disengagement, Albert Bandura explains how individuals can suspend the restraints that ordinarily regulate their conduct by justifying harm in the name of a higher purpose, softening its brutality through language, blaming the victim, or dispersing responsibility among others.[4] These mechanisms allow individuals to continue seeing themselves as committed to doing good. An assault may be described as punishment, revenge as the restoration of justice, and obedience to an authority as a virtue that takes precedence over responsibility for consequences. Language, in this context, helps organize moral judgment of an act, making it acceptable within the group that uses it.

Bandura’s 1999 article begins with an account of moral self-regulation that connects conduct to internal standards and to the self-reproach or satisfaction people anticipate experiencing. The mechanisms of disengagement explain how these controls can be selectively suspended while moral standards are retained in other domains. They operate at several points: redescribing the conduct, obscuring the agent’s responsibility, minimizing the consequences, and changing how the victim is judged. In this way, ordinary and considerate behavior toward people in one circle can coexist with acceptance of severe harm toward those in another.

The article identifies eight interconnected mechanisms: moral justification, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison with more brutal acts, displacement of responsibility to an authority, diffusion of responsibility across a group, disregarding or minimizing consequences, dehumanization of those harmed, and attribution of blame to them. These mechanisms derive much of their force from working together. A person may use softened language to describe an act, attribute the decision to orders, and believe that the victim brought the suffering upon themselves. The approach explains how a sense of moral commitment can persist even as the circumstances in which the individual applies that commitment change. It also directs attention to the social systems that divide roles and obscure the relationship between participation and harm.

Grievance becomes especially powerful when it is invoked to grant an individual an exemption from the rule that the same individual expects others to respect. The process may begin with an injustice, real or perceived, which is subsequently used to expand the range of permissible actions. Analysis must focus precisely on this transition: how does someone move from demanding the protection of innocent people to accepting attacks on other innocent people? What narrative allows that person to separate the two cases? The problem lies in applying different standards to victims according to their position relative to the group, and in turning justice into a privilege reserved for those considered “one of us.”

Research on the moral motivations for violence adds an important complication. In experiments conducted by Tage Rai and colleagues, the effect of dehumanization varied according to the motive for harm.[5] Violence seen by its perpetrator as morally deserved may be directed against a victim whose humanity, capacity to feel pain, and ability to understand punishment are fully recognized. These results must be interpreted within the limits of the experimental study, but they draw attention to the possibility that perpetrators may deliberately inflict suffering on a person whom they know can feel it, precisely because they regard that suffering as punishment. Addressing this process requires questioning the alleged entitlement to punish, alongside restoring recognition of the victim’s humanity.

The 2017 study by Rai, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Jesse Graham examines the distinction between harm inflicted for instrumental benefit and harm regarded as deserved punishment. The researchers conducted five experiments involving measures of participants’ attitudes and hypothetical scenarios in which descriptions of the target and motives for causing harm were varied. Dehumanization was measured through the attribution of mental and experiential capacities, such as planning, feeling pain, and experiencing emotions. The findings showed that attributing fewer such capacities increased acceptance of instrumental harm, whereas the relationship differed when the motive was to punish someone for conduct considered wrong.

In a punitive context, recognizing the victim’s capacity to understand and feel may become part of the meaning the perpetrator attaches to harm: the victim is conceived as blameworthy and as someone who should be conscious of the punishment. The term “moral violence” here refers to the perpetrator’s evaluation of violence; its legitimacy remains subject to an independent judgment. Likewise, measuring approval or willingness in a hypothetical scenario differs from tracing an actual crime. Instrumental and punitive motives may overlap in real life, so the study offers a distinction between possible mechanisms, while attributing any one of them to a specific case requires case-specific evidence.

This perspective helps explain how cruelty can come to signify seriousness in the eyes of the person inflicting it. Where commitment is tied to a willingness to cause harm, hesitation becomes something that must be justified, and compassion is recast as leniency toward someone believed to deserve punishment. The place of emotion in decision-making consequently changes: sympathy is mobilized for a particular group, while the suffering of others is interpreted through a narrative that makes them responsible for it. The question of the limits of empathy thus becomes part of the question of the boundaries of the group to which an individual extends moral recognition.

Status, Group Belonging, and the Justification of Obedience

The search for significance offers another explanation for the appeal of this pathway. Arie Kruglanski and colleagues connect the need to feel valued with a narrative presenting violence as a means of attaining significance and a social network that validates that narrative and rewards commitment to it.[6] The value of this approach lies in showing how a personal need can become connected to a system of justification and relationships. A group may offer an individual experiencing decline or humiliation a position perceived as meaningful, then tie continued recognition to what the individual contributes to its cause. The direction taken by this need depends on the means and values through which the social environment grants recognition.

In their 2014 article, Kruglanski and colleagues propose a model linking personal motivation, ideological framework, and social relationships. Personal significance refers to the feeling of being valued and worthy of respect. The search for it may be activated by humiliation or loss of status, or by an opportunity to gain recognition. Its direction depends on the means that come to be regarded as acceptable. When an ideological narrative attaches value to violence and a social network rewards those who commit it with recognition, personal motivation converges with a specific pathway for satisfying that need.

The model’s precision lies in the interaction among its three components. A need for significance requires an account of the path through which it can be fulfilled, while the narrative supplying that account requires a social environment that reinforces its meaning and rewards compliance. The article presents empirical evidence consistent with the model and discusses the possibility of directing the quest for significance toward alternatives to violence. Applying the model requires examining the experience that activated the motivation, the content that designated a particular means, and the relationships that sustained it. Feelings of humiliation or the desire for status constitute one element of this composite explanation; understanding their effects requires tracing how they connect to the others.

For this reason, claims such as “marginalization produces extremism” are too sweeping for the phenomenon to be explained. Marginalization takes different forms, responses to it vary, and comparable experiences may lead to divergent paths. The analytical task is to identify the intermediary that gave an experience its meaning: who interpreted the humiliation? Who identified the person responsible? Which act was presented as capable of restoring status? Such specificity allows grievances to be examined seriously while keeping individual responsibility for choices in view.

The group plays a central role in stabilizing this meaning. An idea entertained in isolation carries a different weight from one upon which acceptance by trusted friends depends. Research on identity fusion examines a profound sense of unity between the personal self and the group, and its relationship to willingness to make extreme sacrifices on the group’s behalf. This perspective helps explain how defending the group acquires a deeply personal character and how a perceived threat to the group may be experienced as a threat to the self. Explaining why such bonds turn toward violence requires examining the values adopted by the group and the circumstances in which it operates.

William Swann and colleagues’ 2012 theoretical review describes identity fusion as a deep sense of oneness between the self and the group. Personal identity remains active, and its strength may work together with collective belonging to produce an exceptional willingness to sacrifice. The authors distinguish local fusion, grounded in personal relationships within a small group, from extended fusion, in which feelings of closeness are transferred to a larger group that includes people the individual does not know personally. This distinction helps explain how commitment to a large collectivity can acquire an intensity resembling intimate bonds.

The article reviews research linking measures of identity fusion to willingness to fight or die for the group and discusses the roles of personal agency, arousal, and perceived invulnerability. It also considers other group-serving actions, such as donating money, thereby identifying the broader scope of the concept. Its analytical significance concerns the strength of the bond and the motivation to act for the group; the nature of the action remains connected to group norms and the circumstances that call it forth. Moving from a measure of identity fusion to an explanation of attacks against others therefore requires identifying what made such an attack appear to serve the group.[7]

Obedience raises a further question about agency and responsibility. Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher revisit the conventional interpretation of certain conformity experiments, highlighting the role of identification with authority and belief in the legitimacy of its project in shaping willingness to follow it.[8] This perspective helps explain cases in which followers act with enthusiasm and initiative because they see themselves as participants in a cause they believe in. In this form of involvement, authority can provide a language of legitimacy while the individual contributes personal effort and choice.

Haslam and Reicher’s 2012 article critically reassesses interpretations of Milgram’s obedience experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment associated with Zimbardo. These research programs have often been invoked to explain compliance as an automatic response to commands or assigned roles. The authors reread the evidence through identification with authority and its project. Willingness to follow instructions is thus connected to the extent to which participants regard the authority as representing a purpose they endorse and to the meaning they attach to their participation.

This interpretation highlights the follower’s active role: a person may act with effort and initiative because they believe they are serving a worthy cause. Explaining variation in responses must also address resistance and the limits of what an individual is prepared to accept from authority. The article’s importance lies in reopening the relationship between obedience and conviction. It offers a theoretical interpretation grounded in a critical reading of previous research, and its use requires preserving both its critical character and the scope of the evidence discussed. It thus makes it possible to examine obedience through the identity of the authority and the perceived legitimacy of its purpose, while continuing to hold followers accountable for their role in implementation.

Competition for recognition within a group can make more extreme positions a source of status, while isolation can narrow the sources from which corrective information is obtained. Scholarship on radicalization pathways considers the interaction between grievances and bonds among friends and relatives, as well as the influence of isolated groups and intergroup competition in driving positions toward greater extremity.[9] These factors become particularly important when considering the cost of withdrawal: what would an individual lose by changing course, and who would welcome them outside the circle that has come to provide meaning and recognition?

Digital environments add another dimension to these relationships. An individual may live among people they know personally while deriving their interpretation of those people from a distant network that supplies ready-made categories. Careful inquiry must examine what that network does in a particular case: how did it respond to doubt? How did it select the events it presented? Who acquired the authority to pass judgment within it? These questions are more precise than attributing causation to a platform simply because it was used. They allow researchers to assess whether the digital environment supplied companionship, recognition, or justification, and how it interacted with the individual’s life beyond the screen.

The Distance Between Conviction and Action

The move to action requires an explanation of its own. Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko distinguish radicalization of opinion from radicalization of behavior, making it possible to examine where the two pathways diverge and intersect.[10] A relationship with a group may precede fully formed convictions; convictions may change through participation; and strongly held beliefs may persist without translating into violent conduct. Explaining an act therefore requires reconstructing the individual’s actual trajectory, examining relationships, experiences, and decisions, and identifying the moments when what the person accepted or was willing to do changed.

In their 2017 article, McCauley and Moskalenko formulate the two-pyramids model to distinguish an individual’s position in the sphere of opinion from their position in the sphere of action. The opinion pyramid differentiates neutrality, sympathy with a cause, justification of violence in its defense, and a sense of personal obligation to engage in it. The action pyramid distinguishes non-involvement, legal activism, illegal action, and, at its apex, the unlawful targeting of civilians. These levels describe analytical positions between which individuals may move upward or downward, sometimes skipping intermediate stages.

The distinction matters because knowing what someone believes leaves open questions about what they do. Practical involvement may also be linked to personal relationships, a quest for status, or a desire for revenge. The article reviews literature and evidence supporting this differentiation and draws attention to the role of means and opportunities in explaining why some individuals with extreme views become active perpetrators. The relationship between opinion and action must be examined within each trajectory, while distinguishing the explanation of an act that has occurred from the prediction of who might commit one. Accordingly, tools for studying the spread of ideas differ from those needed to reconstruct the decision to attack, its stages, and the relationships surrounding it.

This approach guards against treating people as though they move along a single ladder that necessarily ends in violence. It also offers a more precise standard for prevention: examining justifications for attacks, threats, and relationships that facilitate a transition to violent practice, while protecting freedom of religion, opinion, and peaceful protest. Clear conceptual boundaries are politically important because expanding the category to encompass disagreement confuses diagnosis, undermines confidence in the institutions responsible for responding, and makes cooperation with them more difficult.

Jordan, Neighborly Relations, and the Test of Citizenship

The attack on Hamoud Church in Karak revived a question that extends beyond the instant when shots are fired: how does someone come to believe that harming people gathered to mourn a death could be a legitimate act? What happens to their relationship with others when those others’ identities become sufficient grounds for targeting them? These questions carry particular weight in a society where neighborly, family, and professional relationships overlap and where people know one another through the details of everyday life. When violence strikes these relationships, understanding it becomes inseparable from examining how people are redefined and which authority gives such redefinitions greater force than years of shared personal knowledge.

The question that demands an answer is how perpetrators preserve a moral image of themselves and how they come to regard cruelty as loyalty to a cause or fulfillment of a duty. Approaching this issue requires examining the relationship among belief, belonging, and responsibility, and understanding the conditions that make violence acceptable to those who carry it out. Attributing any particular pathway to the perpetrators of a specific crime depends on evidence established by investigations. The study of violent-extremist mechanisms offers interpretive tools, but every case requires an independent assessment of their applicability.

A person can be Jordanian, Muslim or Christian, from a particular city or village, a colleague and a friend, moving among these affiliations depending on the circumstances.

Consider a hypothetical example. Someone has known a colleague for twenty years and can attest to that colleague’s integrity and willingness to help others. Yet that person subsequently adopts a discourse that classifies the colleague’s religious or social group as a threat. Direct knowledge may disrupt the classification, but the person embracing that discourse may find a way to protect the belief: treating the colleague as an exception or interpreting their kindness as concealing some other truth. Either way, the general image remains insulated from challenge, and everyday experience loses its capacity to alter it. This is one way categorization can overpower personal knowledge.

In my assessment, this is one of the issues deserving serious discussion in Jordan. Someone may maintain a good relationship with an individual who differs from them while simultaneously embracing a view that diminishes the collective rights of the group to which that individual belongs. Personal courtesy can coexist with a hierarchical conception of society. The relationship becomes more fragile when the other person’s presence is regarded as acceptable only under conditions determined by the majority or the more powerful group. The real test concerns what we recognize as belonging to that person when they disagree with us, claim their rights, or act independently of our expectations.

In Jordan, this distinction can be translated into questions about the experiences created by schools, universities, and workplaces. Acquaintance allows people to know those who differ from them; equal participation in a shared task or decision offers an opportunity to recognize them as partners. When a student learns that an objection to the humiliation of a classmate is treated with the same seriousness, or an employee experiences fair treatment when disagreeing with colleagues, equality becomes grounded in an experience upon which they can rely. That experience becomes more valuable when it extends beyond a relationship with a well-liked person to a general rule applying to strangers and those with whom one disagrees. The question, then, is whether shared institutions can turn familiarity into recognition of a general right that endures even when affection wanes or conflict arises.

Protecting a classification from contradictory facts requires constructing a particular authority over knowledge. When a single source becomes the definitive interpreter of the world, news and events can be reinterpreted through a narrative already considered complete. Questions come to signify disloyalty to the group, disagreement carries a social cost, and acknowledging error threatens the status a person has built around their beliefs. At that point, the difficulty of reconsideration is tied to what the person might lose by changing their mind: friends, position, or an interpretation of their own past. This perspective helps explain cases in which accurate information fails to produce the effect expected of it.

In Jordan, the issue takes on a more specific form when we distinguish between the people an individual knows and the group whose judgments they rely on to evaluate that knowledge. A person may maintain everyday relationships while seeking recognition from another circle in which hardline positions confer status and hesitation is interpreted as betrayal. Under those conditions, the cost of departing from the group’s position can outweigh the value of direct experience, and criticism of a classification threatens ties with those who provide acceptance. A digital circle may contribute by offering symbolic rewards and repeated affirmation. The question to investigate is therefore who makes the justification of harm against another citizen acceptable, and whether the individual’s immediate surroundings are able to challenge that justification.

Applying the distinction between opinion and action in Jordan requires identifying the moment when justification of harm turns into a personal willingness to bear its consequences and participate in it. The desire for recognition may intersect with a belief that an attack serves a goal worth its cost, or that retreat would result in loss of status within a circle of belonging. Previous participation may strengthen this commitment when withdrawal comes to imply admitting that an earlier act or endorsement was wrong. These remain possible trajectories whose presence must be tested against evidence from each case. The intensity of belief alone leaves a considerable explanatory gap before an attack can be understood. Prevention becomes more precise when it relies on specific evidence of threats, incitement, and participation, with responsibility attributed to each individual according to their role.

Citizenship and the Authority to Guarantee Protection

For Jordan, these levels of analysis lead to a question about the structure of national security: who has the authority to define the citizen, and who guarantees the citizen’s protection? When a group grants itself the power to test others’ belonging, a parallel authority emerges that determines who deserves safety and under what conditions. It reaches its most extreme form when it claims the right to punish. At that point, an attack becomes a practical claim to decide the fate of others, and confronting it implicates the state’s capacity to sustain a common framework of responsibility and rights.

The danger becomes evident in the very meaning of protection. If citizens begin to measure their security by the number of people belonging to their religious community, their community leaders’ access to officials, or the support they can mobilize, the group becomes an intermediary between citizens and their rights. Such mediation may offer temporary reassurance, but its stability remains dependent on balances of power and influence. Institutional protection, by contrast, has meaning when individuals can rely on it even when they are fewer in number, less influential, or more different from those around them.

From this perspective, describing Jordanian Christians as people with an inherent right to belong to the country carries immediate political and security implications. That right tests the capacity of citizenship to endure under pressure and of institutions to guarantee the public expression of identity. Praying, celebrating, and mourning the dead are ways in which people enact their belonging to a place. When these become sources of fear, the damage also reaches their relationship with the future: can they imagine their children living there with the same sense of security?

What happens after the crime warrants equally close attention. Fear may prompt some individuals to reduce their participation, change their habits, or seek more homogeneous social circles. These possibilities must be investigated through the experiences of those affected, without holding them responsible for the fear they have suffered. The potential political consequence is a decline in the encounters that once produced mutual knowledge and an increasing reliance on generalized images of others. Over time, fear can thus weaken the very relationships that help resist categorization.

The importance of the societal response lies in its capacity to prevent this consequence from taking root. Public solidarity offers those affected clear recognition of their place and rights, and it becomes more meaningful when sustained in daily life after public attention fades. The practical question concerns whether people return to their places and occasions, and whether they can exercise their rights without a constant need for exceptional arrangements and personal guarantees. This is where the relationship between protective measures and the actual experience of security can be assessed.

An intellectual response requires comparable precision. In schools and universities, students can be trained to unpack the leap from an individual’s act to the condemnation of an entire group and to evaluate the evidence on which judgments rest. In religious discourse, responsibility involves confronting claims that grant individuals authority to attack the lives of others and addressing the specific arguments used to make harm permissible. In the media, preserving victims’ names and personal histories and locating responsibility with the perpetrators can help resist the reduction of people to opposing blocs.

These efforts need to be supported by institutional experience. Citizens who can raise objections and access an institution that listens, explains its decisions, and is subject to accountability have a route for resolving disagreements within the public sphere. Fairness gains value when it can be tested in everyday procedures. Political participation, equal treatment, and trust in institutions are therefore connected to society’s capacity to keep grievances open to claims and review, and to protect those who hold them from closed groups seeking to monopolize the interpretation of their experiences and the determination of their choices.

The Impact of the Crime and the Limits of the Response

Restoring the authority of personal knowledge is therefore an essential part of this effort. A person’s life and conduct must remain capable of changing our judgments about them, and individuals must retain both responsibility for their own actions and rights independent of our judgments about their group. When a neighbor we know is dismissed as merely an exception, we can question the narrative that systematically excludes contradictory evidence. When someone is made to bear responsibility for others, their own actions must remain the basis of accountability.

Killing becomes a duty along one pathway to extremism when the perpetrator assumes the authority to define the victim, determine their guilt, and decide their punishment, and then finds a narrative and a group that confer recognition for the act. Resisting this pathway begins by reasserting the boundaries it seeks to cross: individual responsibility for choices, the other person’s right to safety, and the authority of institutions to protect rights and hold perpetrators accountable. The clearer, fairer, and more dependable these boundaries are, the greater society’s capacity to confront those who seek to seize the power to judge whether others may live in safety.

The question Karak places before us remains profoundly immediate: how do we preserve the person we have known from being reduced to the category others seek to impose upon them? The answer connects identity to security and citizenship to everyday life. Its meaning becomes visible when someone can enter a church or mosque, say farewell to a loved one, and return home secure in the knowledge that their place in the country is assured.

References

[1] Turner, J. C., Oakes, P. J., Haslam, S. A., & McGarty, C. (1994). Self and collective: Cognition and social context. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20(5), 454–463. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167294205002

[2] Turner, J. C., Sachdev, I., & Hogg, M. A. (1983). Social categorization, interpersonal attraction and group formation. British Journal of Social Psychology, 22(3), 227–239. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.1983.tb00587.x

[3] Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751–783. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751

[4] Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3

[5] Rai, T. S., Valdesolo, P., & Graham, J. (2017). Dehumanization increases instrumental violence, but not moral violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(32), 8511–8516. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1705238114

[6] Kruglanski, A. W., Gelfand, M. J., Bélanger, J. J., Sheveland, A., Hetiarachchi, M., & Gunaratna, R. (2014). The psychology of radicalization and deradicalization: How significance quest impacts violent extremism. Political Psychology, 35(S1), 69–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12163

[7] Swann, W. B., Jr., Jetten, J., Gómez, Á., Whitehouse, H., & Bastian, B. (2012). When group membership gets personal: A theory of identity fusion. Psychological Review, 119(3), 441–456. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028589

[8] Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2012). Contesting the “nature” of conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s studies really show. PLOS Biology, 10(11), e1001426. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001426

[9] McCauley, C., & Moskalenko, S. (2008). Mechanisms of political radicalization: Pathways toward terrorism. Terrorism and Political Violence, 20(3), 415–433. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546550802073367

[10] McCauley, C., & Moskalenko, S. (2017). Understanding political radicalization: The two-pyramids model. American Psychologist, 72(3), 205–216. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000062