Networked social movements and radicalisation: yellow vests' cross-ideological horizon for underrepresented groups
This paper questions the opportunities that Yellow Vests as a Networked Social Movement (NETSM) created for politically underrepresented groups. Without a clear authority structure and a formal organisation, NETSMs challenge traditional leadership understandings. Nonetheless, their ability to determine precision in setting goals, demands, and strategies is disputed in the NETSM literature. Considering both aspects, the paper evaluates Yellow Vests' success in bridging two underrepresented groups inclined to radicalisation. The study rests on 77 interviews with young-adult French citizens who support Radical Right movements (n=40) or self-identify as Muslim in the public sphere of Paris and Lyon (n=37). I argue that Yellow Vests' baseline arguments (e.g., against the pension reform and tax hikes) were precise enough to be shared by our interlocutors. Meanwhile, our interlocutors left the group boundaries sufficiently imprecise so that the movement could reach beyond their parochial identities. Bringing the two features together, the movement opened up new (e.g., class-based) radicalisation possibilities other than those relying on the Islamist and nativist vocabularies. After analysing this combination of precision and imprecision in the context of several unresolved problems, I conclude that the movement's vulnerability emanates from its failure to refine the combination that initially symbolised a shared future imagination.
In search of an appropriate channel for voicing political concerns: political participation among radicalised youth in Europe
This research aims to identify values related to political and civic participation methods among the two groups of radicalised youngsters: native youth who support movements labelled as far-right ( 122) and migrant-origin self-identified Muslim youth with strong organisational ties with religious communities (109) in Germany, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. The study posits that these these radically aligned youngsters position themselves against politically moderate European citizens, who are less intuitive when making judgements on political affairs comparing to them. Diverging from the unifying European values and hypersensitivities, these youngsters' political reactions are often radical and loud in their safe-to-speak, segregated movements. By using the narrations of the range of mainstream modes of political participation, the current qualitative research asks what appears valuable for the two groups of young people to express their political discontent. Findings revealed that both groups highlighted similar values regarding voting. Self-identified Muslim youth stressed the importance of volunteering and street protests (despite not having participated in one). Many native youths, on the other hand, stressed the function of unlawful behaviour in street protests to pursue political objectives. The findings such as these are discussed considering the group differences.
Towards a fruitful concept of radicalisation: a synthesis
The term 'radicalisation' is relatively new. It is mostly the result of the political climate since 2005, but now widely used in work on extremism, fundamentalism, conspiracism, fanaticism, terrorism, and counter-terrorism. But exactly what is radicalisation and can we still properly use the term in the face of the many objections that have been levelled against it? I defend a conception of radicalisation that combines the fourmain approaches in the literature, the so-called monist and pluralist, as well as the absolutist and relativist ones. It does so on the basis of conceptual analysis, reflective equilibrium and particular case studies. Since the term will not be going away, it is wiser to be as lucid on how one defines it as possible. Such a definition matters for three reasons: there is much confusion in the public debate about radicalisation, e.g. about Islamism, increasing right-wing radicalisation in Europe and North America, and the views of conspiracy thinkers and anti-vaxxers, the term 'radicalisation' is also widely used in the academic literature on terrorism and counter-terrorism, but there is much unclarity about its relation to violence, to phenomena like fundamentalism, extremism, terrorism, and, finally, in order to be fruitful in research we need a definition that can be operationalized.
Struggle and banality of belonging to Europe. Cultural Europeanization from the perspective of the Central and East European citizens
The European Union (EU) has developed cultural policy initiatives that seek to promote cultural Europeanization with the purpose of constructing European identity narratives and facilitating citizens' sense of belonging to Europe and the EU. The article focuses on the citizens' perspective to cultural Europeanization through ethnographic research on one central action in the EU cultural policy, European Heritage Label (EHL). We analyse the interviews conducted in selected EHL sites with Central and East European (CEE) citizens who were visiting the sites as well as with cultural heritage practitioners working at three EHL sites located in CEE countries. We ask how the practitioners and the visitors engage with European identity narratives and elaborate their European belonging. We especially scrutinize how everyday encounters and experiences, such as mobility, shape identifications with 'Europe' and perceptions of what is 'European'. The interviews are interpreted in the theoretical framework of 'being' and 'becoming' European. This framework indicates a centuries-long liminal position of the Central and Eastern Europe. It enables us to scrutinize CEE citizens' sense of belonging to Europe in an intersection of dual Europeanization, i.e. cultural Europeanization and 'Europeanization' of the CEE countries to overcome this liminal position and become 'true' Europeans.
The differential impact of EU attitudes on voting behaviour in the European parliamentary elections 2019
EU attitudes are multidimensional and likely to matter differentially for voting across different parties. The 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections offer a unique setting for testing the differential effects of multidimensional EU attitudes, as the election results entailed increased political fragmentation - with notable pro- and anti-EU party groups in the EP gaining strength. This article examines the importance of EU attitudes on electoral choice and zooms in on the influence of specific EU attitudes on party voting in EP elections ('EU issue voting'). We use original survey data collected around the 2019 EP elections in ten EU member states, which include a fine-grained measurement of EU attitudes. We find evidence for EU issue voting in all countries, albeit not equally structured across countries. EU issue voting matters across all party groups with affective and performance evaluations having the strongest effects.
Becoming a European prisoner: penal reforms and European belonging in Georgia and Estonia
Over the past three decades many former Soviet states introduced reforms to the penal systems they inherited from socialist regimes. In most countries of the post-Soviet space, these reforms have been depicted by policy-makers as projects of 'Europeanization'. This article investigates the discursive construction of penal reform in Georgia and Estonia after these countries gained independence. We examine images and practices of punishment and answer two questions: how are post-Soviet penal reforms framed by policy-makers and experienced by prisoners? How is Europeanization of punishment understood in the post-Soviet space? We conduct an analysis of policy discourse and of narratives of people who witnessed these changes while serving prison sentences. We treat images of 'Europe' as a discursively produced ideational structure, and analyze how different understandings of punishment are linked to, or pitted against, ideas of Europeanness. We locate our study within the framework of critical approaches to European integration, and introduce the study of punishment to these debates. We show that punishment is not simply another case study of the relations between a European 'centre' and its 'peripheries', but argue rather that images and practices of 'European punishment' create new social hierarchies and fractures in post-Soviet societies.