‘Radicalisation’ and ‘countering radicalisation’

With the string of attacks that struck Europe in 2004 and 2005, ‘radicalisation’ has become the primary prism for understanding the motivations that lead individuals to embrace terrorism. Terrorism as the result of a ‘radicalisation process’ is now often an unquestioned axiom and considered self-evident. With hindsight, however, the new idiom has been less of a conceptual breakthrough than initially anticipated.