Explores the ways in which the non-elite literary culture of the late seventeenth to mid eighteenth centuries worked to produce knowledge through collaborative means, in opposition to this period's more widely recognized focus on the authority of individuality.

Understanding Radicalism: How It Affects What’s Happening in Education and Student’s Overall examines and explores the ever-growing trend to use education, outside groups, and social media as agencies of indoctrination and moral suasion, to capture the imaginations, thus prompting students to question their own racial and gender identities.

This book addresses the problem of religiously based conflict and violence via six case studies. It stresses particularly the structural and relational aspects of religion as providing a sense of order and a networked structure that enables people to pursue quite prosaic and earthly concerns. The book examines how such concerns link material and spiritual salvation into a holy alliance. As such, whilst the religions concerned may be different, they address the same problems and provide similar explanations for meaning, success, and failure in life. Each author has conducted their own field-work in the religiously based conflict regions they discuss, and together the collection offers perspectives from a variety of different national backgrounds and disciplines.

Political, literary, and cultural historians of the early modern Anglophone world have long characterized the crucial century between 1642 and 1742 as the period when absolutist theories of sovereignty yielded their dominance to shared models of governance and a burgeoning doctrine of unalienable, individual rights. Yet even the most cursory glance at the cultural record, reveals that individualism was largely a footnote to a conflict over the production of political and cultural authority that erupted around the middle of the seventeenth century between sovereignty and collectivity. Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History reaches back to the English civil wars (1642-46, 1648) when a distinctive and anti-authoritarian hermeneutic emerged from the dissident community known as the Levellers. Active between 1645 and 1653, the Levellers argued that a more just political order required that knowledge, previously structured by the epistemology of singularity upon which sovereignty had built its authority, be reorganized around the interpretive principles and practices of affiliation and collectivity. Collective Understanding contends that late Stuart and eighteenth-century literature played a central role in marginalizing the non-elite methods of interpretation and knowledge production that had emerged in the 1640s. While pamphlets and other readily available texts ridiculed members of the commonalty, it was the longer narrative arcs of drama and fiction that were uniquely able to foreground the collaborative methods civil war dissidents and the Levellers in particular had used to advance their opposition to sovereignty's epistemological paradigm. Writers such as William Davenant, Aphra Behn, Edward Sexby, Algernon Sidney, and Daniel Defoe repeatedly exposed these dissident methods as a profound and potentially catastrophic challenge to the political privileges of the ancien régime as well as its ancestral monopoly on the production of new knowledge.

What extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence. A rising tide of extremist movements threaten to destabilize civil societies around the globe. It has never been more important to understand extremism, yet the dictionary definition—a logical starting point in a search for understanding—tells us only that extremism is “the quality or state of being extreme.” In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, J. M. Berger offers a nuanced introduction to extremist movements, explaining what extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence. Berger shows that although the ideological content of extremist movements varies widely, there are common structural elements. Berger, an expert on extremist movements and terrorism, explains that extremism arises from a perception of “us versus them,” intensified by the conviction that the success of “us” is inseparable from hostile acts against “them.” Extremism differs from ordinary unpleasantness—run-of-the-mill hatred and racism—by its sweeping rationalization of an insistence on violence. Berger illustrates his argument with case studies and examples from around the world and throughout history, from the destruction of Carthage by the Romans—often called “the first genocide”—to the apocalyptic jihadism of Al Qaeda, America's new “alt-right,” and the anti-Semitic conspiracy tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He describes the evolution of identity movements, individual and group radicalization, and more. If we understand the causes of extremism, and the common elements of extremist movements, Berger says, we will be more effective in countering it.

Terrorism and radicalization came to the forefront of news and politics in the US after the unforgettable attacks of September 11th, 2001. When George W. Bush famously asked "Why do they hate us?," the President echoed the confusion, anger and fear felt by millions of Americans, while also creating a politicized discourse that has come to characterize and obscure discussions of both phenomenon in the media. Since then the American public has lived through a number of domestic attacks and threats, and watched international terrorist attacks from afar on television sets and computer screens. The anxiety and misinformation surrounding terrorism and radicalization are perhaps best detected in questions that have continued to recur in the last decade: "Are terrorists crazy?"; "Is there a profile of individuals likely to become terrorists?"; "Is it possible to prevent radicalization to terrorism?" Fortunately, in the two decades since 9/11, a significant body of research has emerged that can help provide definitive answers. As experts in the psychology of radicalization, Sophia Moskalenko and Clark McCauley propose twelve mechanisms that can move individuals, groups, and mass publics from political indifference to sympathy and support for terrorist violence. Radicalization to Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to Know synthesizes original and existing research to answer the questions raised after each new attack, including those committed by radicalized Americans. It offers a rigorously informed overview of the insight that will enable readers to see beyond the relentless new cycle to understand where terrorism comes from and how best to respond to it.

This book explores two of the most crucial areas of the war on terror: 1) why some Muslims turn to violent jihad, and 2) that process in the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia. The recent history of terrorism in Indonesia has brought this country into the world spotlight: the Bali night club bombing by Islamists in 2002 was one of the worst terrorist attacks in history. The recent violence following the executions of three of the Bali bombers, together with a number of thwarted bomb plots, demonstrate the continuing danger posed by radicalized violent Islamists in the country. Written by one of Southeast Asias leading counter-terrorism experts, Radical Pathways offers innovative new perspectives on the sources of violent Muslim radicalization and what should be done to counter it.