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RADICALIZATION

WHY SOME PEOPLE CHOOSE THE PATH OF VIOLENCE

A timely, systematic breakdown of thee reasons for radicalization.

A French scholar delineates the attractions of violent extremism, specifically jihadi Islam.

In this concise translation from the French, Khosrokhavar (Director of Studies/School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris) moves from general notions of radicalization, which have historically involved pockets of marginalized and ghettoized minorities from the 11th-century Assassins to the Europeans terrorists in the “years of lead,” to the specific current ideological radicalism in the Muslim world. What has changed? The author emphasizes that this newest crop of radicals involves a phenomenon that is “more intense” than previous eras: larger in scope, more widespread, enduring over a longer period of time, and involving more random violence and a troubling “capacity to adapt to extreme situations through reorganization”—e.g., the adaptability of al-Qaida. Khosrokhavar finds that radicalization takes different paths in the Muslim world and in the European theater. In the former, the radicals tend to be young people from the middle classes who feel disenfranchised against corrupt and authoritative regimes and are bent on establishing “a transnational Islamic regime.” In the latter, young radicals emerge from the lower social strata in tough neighborhoods and are often children of immigrants, such as the young people of North African descent in France. The author looks at the small but growing numbers of women joining radical jihadism, often acting to avenge the death of a husband, brother, or father or acting out (in a severely repressed Muslim society) from an “antipatriarchal, even feminist dimension.” Living in France, Khosrokhavar is particularly attuned to the radicalization that occurs among the young immigrants living in the banlieues of Lyon and elsewhere, fraught by ghetto conditions and “intense dehumanization,” and he offers insight into the radicalization that occurs in prisons, when vulnerable criminals are converted by a charismatic “radicalizer.”

A timely, systematic breakdown of thee reasons for radicalization.

Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-62097-268-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: The New Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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