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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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There are a couple of problems with this question.

Everyone of us know how riots, revolts and political radicalism are born

Those are very distinct phenomena. Conflating them is highly problematic.

a segment of the population, resented or alienated by material means

This is not very clear, but if it is meant to refer to economic deprivation, it has been clear for decades that economic deprivation is a poor predictor of participation in political violence; at best, the relationship is highly contingent. Eg:

There does appear to be an inverted “U” relationship between terrorism and the factors of education and wealth, although that relationship might be contested in terms of measurement validity. Some of this complexity probably stems from the conflation of the revolutions/rebellion literature and the terrorism literature, because much of the former focused on peasant rebellions or the role of the “masses” in fomenting revolution. More-recent demographic research has revealed that individual participants in terrorist groups and in terrorist violence are both more educated and more financially well off than was previously believed—although this was no surprise to scholars who studied anarchist and other social revolutionary terrorist groups in the 1970s. However, the emerging picture of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq suggests that they fit the old model of the undereducated, unemployed, alienated terrorist far better than the new model. This contrast, too, might be better understood by distinguishing types of terrorism.

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