Interrupting radicalization: The impact of family and peer-based vs. police-based intervention

Contemporary research on radicalization tends to focus on individuals who have already committed violence for political or religious purposes. There is, however, a much larger group of individuals who engaged in radicalization processes but who opted out before they got involved in serious crime or violence. This article examines interventions targeting that particular group. Our study examines the early interventions by family members, peers, the police and security service that intended to interrupt the radicalization of Muslims in the wake of the Syrian civil war. Our analysis is based on interviews with young Muslims in Norway who themselves – or their relatives or close acquaintances – considered to travel to Syria, supported the Islamic State (IS), or was involved in an extremist milieu, but who subsequently decided not to leave for Syria, dropped their support for IS and left the extremist milieu. The aim of our study is to capture the nature and impact of the different interventions described by the young Muslim interviewees, and the role those interventions played in interrupting the radicalization of the individuals in question. We distinguish between what we define as family and peer-based interventions and police-based (including the police security service) interventions. The young Muslims of our study emphasized the family and peer-based interventions as most influential in interrupting radicalization, with everyday religious guidance standing out as particularly important. The police-based interventions had mixed impacts on the radicalization of those who were targeted. It had, however, a clear preventive impact on the peers of the targeted person, who saw the intervention as a warning of the risk of engaging with people considered as militant Islamists by the police or security service. Related to these findings, we also discuss the key differences between the family and peer-based interventions versus the police-based interventions, as well as the fundamental challenges of combining these different types of interventions. Our study contributes to the literature on early interventions against radicalization by providing important insights and opportunity to learn from the informal civilian interventions that happen primarily outside of, and before, state involvement. Drawing from the first-hand accounts of young Muslims themselves about what interventions they experienced as t leading to the interruption of radicalization processes, provides an approach to the issues of deradicalization and disengagement that is often missing in the scholarly literature.