Author
As already underlined on VORTEX blog, radicalisation has become a focal point, with a plethora of media and academic writings on the subject. Many researchers have already pointed out the field’s theoretical and empirical (Dawson, 2019; Nilsson, 2018; Sageman, 2018) shortcomings. Of course, much contemporary research has begun to address these issues (Robert and Kaya, 2023). Yet, despite the ‘reflexive turn’ prompted by the rise of post-positivism (Hamati-Ataya, 2013) and the simultaneous calls for the decolonisation of the social sciences (Reiter, 2022), which urge researchers to reflect on their position and privilege (Abdelnour and Abu Moghli, 2021), as well as to consider their potential involvement in perpetuating racial and gender hierarchies (Behl, 2017), reflexive enquiries remain rare in radicalisation and terrorism studies (Ajil, 2023). As Esholdt and Jørgensen (2021: 433) state, the vast majority of methodological contributions in the field of radicalisation involve overviews of research design and data collection, or guidelines on conducting interviews with radicals and/or terrorists. Of particular concern is the lack of critical engagement with positionality in a research area where respondents are predominantly male, racialised, and from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, while researchers are typically “white/Western/bourgeois/heterosexual” (Chukwuma, 2024: 855).
Reflexivity is indeed an epistemological practice aimed at acknowledging how researchers’ positionality, privilege, and institutional affiliations shape knowledge production (Shaw et al., 2020; Kapinga et al., 2022). It is also an ethical imperative that advocates for greater transparency. Without reflexivity, scholarship risks reproducing the hierarchies and exclusions from which its participants suffer, thereby exacerbating their marginalisation (Lewis et al., 2023; Huizinga, 2024). By foregrounding reflexive enquiry, researchers can account more carefully for the asymmetrical power relations embedded in fieldwork encounters, mitigate the risk of reinforcing structural inequalities, and ensure that knowledge production remains attentive to the vulnerabilities and lived realities of participants in studies of this kind (O’Brien et al., 2022; Genova and Zontini, 2023). In a certain way, the marginalisation of discussions around positionality and reflexivity in research on radicalisation reintroduces the archaic positivist view of the researcher as being “neutral” and almost “transparent”: his or her identity and trajectory is supposed to have no impact on the data collection process. Scholars also consider this lack is hindering imperative for transparency and replicability (Schmidt, 2021). But how can we explain this gap in the field of radicalisation research? Firstly, reflexivity is very often linked to ethnography and ethnography has a much more recent history in the field of radicalisation (Esholdt & Jørgensen, 2021). Ajil (2023, p. 75) offers several explanations for this, including “the difficulty of gaining field access, a reticence to provide interviewees with a potential platform to publicise their ideas or whitewash their image, apprehensions that interviewing as a social practice may be seen as complicity or collusion, fear of legal consequences of engaging with offenders, doubts about interviewees’ veracity, and a general aversion to fieldwork”. A second possible explanation may lie in the fact that reflexivity is uncomfortable. It involves exposing how the researcher’s identity may have influenced the fieldwork, revealing potential weaknesses, setbacks and even a few mishaps. In that sense, Pillow (2003), for example, addressed strong pieces of criticisms to accounts of reflexivity that remain superficial. Consequently, even though it is a demanding exercise, a reflective commitment that consists of revealing the conditions under which the research was produced, questioning the place that the researcher occupied in the field, and considering the potential impact of who he or she is (in terms of age, gender, race, etc) on the data he or she was able to collect, constitutes a virtuous circle in the field of radicalisation studies.
References
Abdelnour, S., & Abu Moghli, M. (2021). Researching violent contexts: A call for political reflexivity. Organization, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084211030646
Ajil, A. (2023). Studying Terror Through My I’s: Autoethnographic Insider/Outsider Reflections of an Arab-Muslim Researcher. Perspectives on Terrorism, 17(2), 74–91. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27255593
Behl, N. (2017). Diasporic researcher: an autoethnographic analysis of gender and race in political science. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 5(4), 580-598. https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2016.1141104
Chukwuma, K. (2024). The critical terrorism researcher: identity, positionality, and (de)coloniality. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 17(4), 854–877. https://doi-org.ezproxy.ulb.ac.be/10.1080/17539153.2024.2370546
Dawson, L. L. (2019). Taking Terrorist Accounts of their Motivations Seriously: An Exploration of the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. Perspectives on Terrorism, 13(5), 74–89. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26798579
Esholdt, H. F., & Jørgensen K. E. (2021a). Emotional Trials in Terrorism Research: Running Risks When Accessing Salafi-Jihadist Foreign Fighter Returnees and Their Social Milieu. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 47(4), 432–456. https://doi-org.ezproxy.ulb.ac.be/10.1080/1057610X.2021.1962500
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Hamati-Ataya, I. (2013). Reflectivity, reflexivity, reflexivism: IR’s ‘reflexive turn’ — and beyond. European Journal of International Relations, 19(4), 669–694. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066112437770
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O’Brien, J. E., Brewer, K. B., Jones, L. M., Corkhum, J., & Rizo, C. F. (2022). Rigor and Respect: Recruitment Strategies for Engaging Vulnerable Populations in Research. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 37(17-18)
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Robert, M. V., & Kaya, A. (2023). Political drivers of Muslim youth radicalisation in France: religious radicalism as a response to nativism. Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 32(3), 625–642
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