The Roots of Radicalization

This text attempts to explain the process of radicalization through the concepts associated with disrupted attachment. The majority of the work is devoted to educating the reader regarding attachment and theories of disrupted attachment. Counted employs discourse analysis to analyze scenarios of disrupted attachment in order to demonstrate how radicalized individuals use language to express their anxieties. Overall he adopts a readable writing style while limiting his use of terms specific to the sociological and psychological disciplines, with the result that this work is accessible to beginners, or students uninitiated in these fields… Counted offers a consistent theory of radicalization. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. * Choice Reviews *
Victor Counted’s The Roots of Radicalization: Disrupted Attachment Systems and Displacement is a landmark in bridging interpersonal, place-based, and religious forms of attachment surrounding the twenty-first century’s most pervasive phenomenon: radicalization. Counted frames various forms of extremism within the ecosystem of contemporary social reality, analyzing radicalization’s tragic basis in psychological attachment disruption (whether this pertains to an abstract religious figure or to mundane social and environmental bodies). Counted’s argument converges with other brilliant ideas within recent psychological and social science trends and draws on relevant science-based implications to inspire and design constructive solutions to what could otherwise be a lethal global scenario. -- Marino Bonaiuto, Sapienza University of Rome