In the context of the rapid challenges and changes the world is experiencing today, the importance of combating extremism arises as a fundamental line of defense and a necessity for protecting security and stability. However, combating extremism is considered one of the most complex tasks due to reasons related to extremist ideology itself, its ability to transform, adapt, and evade, and its use of technological advances to achieve rapid access and influence.
This makes the field of combating extremism primarily concerned with daily dealing with a vast amount of diverse publications and theoretical articles—not only those that explicitly and directly incite violence but also those that engage with and address the underlying mechanisms behind the tendency to adopt abnormal behavior among individuals who are considered by researchers as a representative sample. Through this sample, researchers outline the general characteristics of the extremist personality and, based on this, propose solutions that mostly revolve around reintegration, educational framing, and psychological support. Undoubtedly, this approach is effective in building preventive capabilities that allow anticipating individuals’ shifts towards critical levels, which in the worst cases may lead to involvement in acts of terrorism.
However, here we face the following question: Is focusing on the individual enough to understand the phenomenon of extremism? The answer is not simply yes or no. Rather, it can be said that such a focus may blind us to other ways of understanding the deeper backgrounds of extremism that go beyond the individual dimension or the cultural and social contexts. In all these cases, we would remain more connected to the outcomes and symptoms instead of exploring the deep and unseen aspects that form the objective causes behind such intellectual distortions. There are factors that go beyond individuals as independent entities and societies as specific cultural systems to form what resembles complex and intertwined structures. These generate acute susceptibilities to extremism linked to certain times, geographic or civilizational extensions, or ethnic, sectarian, and ideological dimensions. These susceptibilities become an automatic incubator for extremism at the intellectual, behavioral, and organizational levels, raising levels of radicalism across all spheres. This creates what resembles a general climate that produces extremist reactions. Here, psychological feelings or behaviors characterized by extremism become merely superficial phenomena; their deeper meanings only become clear when we go beyond the apparent level of behavior to investigate the underlying background behind it.
Therefore, the causes of extremism are complex and not solely linked to individual choices; even if they may appear, so on the surface. What truly represents the core of this phenomenon and the generative cause of its various manifestations are the antecedents of these factors rather than the subsequent outcomes. Hence, the understanding of ideologies is complete when we pay attention to the importance of investigating the pre-existing predispositions for extremism within minds themselves—as a structure preceding the extremists themselves, who are merely considered samples, molds, and qualitative models, nothing more.
Naturally, it is only appropriate to speak about extremism when certain factors, ideas, beliefs, conditions, or references turn into justifications for a state of conflict. In such cases, if this is not identified in time, the conflict can destroy the fundamental elements that constitute the uniqueness of human nature—humanity that has progressed from barbarism to civilization through the establishment of state institutions, which are the primary guarantors against the degradation of humans to inferior levels. Therefore, monitoring and identifying risk factors that could ignite the initial spark of such extremist tendencies must be a priority above all else.
Reaching and precisely identifying the core ideological drivers of societies will be of critical importance for the objective and strategic understanding of extremism as a hidden factor in certain contexts. Monitoring, accessing, analyzing, and understanding its scope and intersections will enable the process of combating extremism to achieve its goals. It is appropriate that this process begins by moving away from theoretical speculation when addressing the challenges of this issue, because in this case, we will be able to establish an effective and coherent reference framework for all our preventive and proactive plans regarding extremism. Otherwise, we will always have to wait for a conflict to manifest openly through individual or collective behavior, only to then attempt to deal with it—often too late. At that point, proactive plans become essentially ineffective because they are based on recurring phenomena without understanding their deep motives and causes. Conversely, if we were to draw our own intellectual map of potential conflicts by tracing their precise origins and locations without exception across the entire world, as if tracking weather patterns, volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and celestial bodies, what happens at point (A) will have an impact on point (D), and so forth. Here, a comprehensive approach to the risk of extremism becomes more realistic, effective, and embodies the essence of strategic combating.