Why is youth radicalisation framed solely within an individualist lens?
Dec 13, 2024
At the same time as the finding of Amnesty International – over twelve months into the ongoing destruction of Gaza – that the state of Israel is indeed committing genocide, the Five-Eyes security and law enforcement agencies released a jointly authored report sounding the alarm on youth radicalisation.
In the accompanying AFP media release, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess said “[t]he fact that the Five-Eyes have chosen youth radicalisation for our first public research collaboration indicates how concerning, escalating and pressing this challenge is”. AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw said investigations and operational activity has been conducted `against 35 individuals aged 17 years or younger’ since January 2020, of which `57 percent have been charged with either Commonwealth or state-based offences’. Approximately twenty per cent of the priority counter-terrorism cases of ASIO involve young people, Burgess went on to say, and `[i]n every one of the terrorist attacks, disruptions and suspected terrorist incidents in Australia this year, the alleged perpetrator was a young person.”
Extremist sympathies and actions may be attractive to some people of any age (for extremism is not confined to the young). So why is it not considered by national security and law enforcement agencies that radicalisation may be a predictable albeit dangerous response on the part of some individuals to collective and state-sponsored extremism in the form of the genocide we all witness daily on our smartphones?
ASIO and the AFP assert that the risk of youth radicalisation requires `a whole-of-society response- including early intervention – to counter the issue’. Burgess contends that `[p]arents, teachers, health professionals and frontline workers need to understand and identify the early signs of radicalisation. Once ASIO and the AFP get involved, it is usually too late – the young person is already in a dark and dangerous place’.
That constant exposure to livestreaming of a genocide enabled by the ongoing supply of weapons to Israel by our key alliance partner, the United States, might itself plunge young people, indeed people of any age, into `a dark and dangerous place’ – assisted to this perilous point by the intentional policies of none other than the strategic partner on which we continue to rely- is not considered at all.
How is it possible that incentives to youth radicalisation are framed solely within an individualist lens? As the disrupted trajectory of alienated young persons rather than as at least partial product of the radicalisation of `defence’ policy per se? Since when did `the right to defend’ become license for radical offensive assaults on a subject population, to the point that the finding of `plausible’ genocide by the ICJ is now assessed to be actual by Amnesty International? This is even as, no less paradoxically, `a call for collective action’ regarding young individuals who might become radicalised (the actual subtitle of the report jointly authored by our national security and law enforcement agencies) is proposed as the corrective and antidote.
Why, notwithstanding the cataclysmic assaults against the Palestinian people in Gaza – for which arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant as chief architects of that genocide have now been issued – is it still lone and alienated young individuals within liberal democratic societies so-called that are described as `radicalised’, in contrast to the confoundingly egregious rights violations of state actors – and of states per se – including those complicit in the current ongoing genocide?
A part answer to this question is that for inhabitants of liberal democratic societies so-called, violence itself has long been individualised. Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek has distinguished three types of violence – subjective (which is generally overt; `the man with the gun’), symbolic (which is encoded in language) and systemic (enacted in and by economic structures and institutions). While traditionally only the first was acknowledged by the ideology of liberal individualism, and while all three are now starkly apparent to all, the reality that our own governments can be perpetrators of terrorism remains too confronting for many.
We are encouraged to respect `the rule of law’ and to regard violence as the aberration and exception. But in calling out `[t]he dishonesty and double standards of democratic countries’, Michael Peel identifies `a basic lack of decency’ which goes `far beyond any question of pro- or anti-Western ideology’. This is along with hypocritical praise for an international `rules based’ order which has seemed to exist `only to the extent that those who controlled it found it helpful for themselves and others to obey’.
The impunity with which the state of Israel continues to flout international law is only possible because it has been green-lighted and actively supported by western governments – the security and law enforcement agencies of which lament the online radicalisation of a percentage of young individuals with extraordinary blindness both to the actual horrors of the ongoing livestreamed genocide (which will itself be incentivising for some) and the collective and state-based extremism which accounts for this genocide in which so many are complicit.
The disjuncture between focus on and identification of `at risk’ young individuals and the hideous state-sponsored violence we witness daily on social media could scarcely be more glaring. If they seriously want to address youth radicalisation, Western governments and security and law enforcement agencies need to account for and address its collective and state-sponsored precipitants.
Pam Stavropoulos
Pam Stavropoulos, PhD is a consultant with a particular interest in politics and mental health. A former Fulbright Scholar, she left her tenured academic position to pursue study of psychotherapy and is co-author of nationally and internationally endorsed guidelines for treatment of complex trauma. She has held lectureships at Macquarie University and the University of New England, and is a former Program Director of the Jansen Newman Institute. The author of Living under Liberalism: The Politics of Depression in Western Democracies (Florida: Universal, 2008) she has written research reports, political commentary, and is a clinical supervisor in private practice.
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