Counter-radicalization Efforts and Radical Left-libertarian Movements

In 2014, the Swedish government appointed a “national coordinator for protecting democracy against violent extremism”. The goal was to promote interventions at the local level, preventing individuals from becoming “radicalized”, and to offer exit programmes for those participating in “violent extremism”. Three movement milieus were explicitly targeted: radical Islamists, the extreme right and the extreme left. The counter-radicalization efforts are often carried out on the local level by social workers, teachers, police, and civil society actors, and the local municipalities have the overall responsibility of coordinating these efforts. This paper explores the effects of counter-radicalization measures on one specific movement milieu: radical left-libertarian (or extreme left) groups. As these groups themselves generally claims to radicalize prevailing democratic and egalitarian ideals, they provide a suitable case for scrutinizing whether counter-radicalization measures might come in conflict with other state policies, such as the mission to promote equality, democratic values, free speech and critical thinking, or the encouragement into civil society engagement. Through the analysis of interviews with movement activists and “street level bureaucrats” involved in local counter-radicalization efforts, we ask how these measures have been perceived in action. Regarding the radical activists, we investigate how these measures have affected their interplay with political institutions, looking at their patterns of mobilization and their trust in political institutions and democracy. Regarding civil servants, we investigate how they perceive and deal with potentially conflictive objectives between crime prevention and other societal goals.