Journal for Deradicalization

Systematic Review of Trajectories Out of Violent Extremism: Toward a Model of Disengagement Based on Cumulative Disillusionment

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Understanding why individuals disengage from violent extremism is as important as understanding why they become involved in it. While research has largely focused on pathways into radicalization, knowledge about exit trajectories is essential for informing secondary and tertiary prevention efforts. This review aimed to synthesize empirical research on desistance from violent extremism in order to identify key factors, obstacles, and turning points shaping exit trajectories and to develop an empirically grounded model of social reintegration. Following Campbell Collaboration guidelines adapted to the prevention of violent extremism literature, we systematically searched academic databases and gray literature for primary empirical studies on trajectories out of violent extremism published up to December 31, 2023. Due to methodological heterogeneity and the predominance of qualitative studies, the synthesis combined descriptive mapping with AI-assisted thematic analysis. A total of 149 studies met the inclusion criteria out of 14,863 records. The synthesis suggests that desistance rarely results from a single turning point but instead reflects the gradual accumulation of internal tensions and external pressures that generate disillusionment and, in turn, create openings for change. Sustained desistance is supported by relational and structural resources such as family relationships, vocational training, or reintegration programs, which provide alternative sources of identity, belonging, and purpose. However, reintegration remains fragile when individuals encounter stigma, social exclusion, or continued exposure to extremist milieus. Overall, the findings highlight that desistance from violent extremism involves the reconstruction of identity and social belonging, with patterns that overlap with broader desistance models in criminology and related fields.

Minds in Revolution: Radical Worldview Formation and Dissolution as Paradigmatic Shifts

Hannah Galen — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper is about the change beneath belief change: the rebuilding of how a person decides what is true. It argues radicalisation is the formation of a personal worldview, a Weltanschauung governing not only what a person believes but how: what counts as evidence, whose word is trusted, how convictions are justified. On this account, ideology is always present. Absorbed whole or assembled from fragments, the worldview is personally built and ideology's apparent absence is its private construction. Deradicalisation that changes belief content while leaving this epistemic architecture intact tends to fail, producing compliance without transformation and leaving the person open to the next totalising framework.

The framework draws on three fields. From philosophy of science it takes Kuhn, to trace how a worldview consolidates and shifts, Lakatos, to explain why it resists revision, and Feyerabend, to identify the conditions under which a closed framework dissolves. Through psychology it sketches the Biographical Salience Map, which holds that radicalisation runs through life domains and personal constructs weighted differently in each person, accounting for multifinality (identical conditions, but different outcomes). Epistemology then links the two, explaining how these knowledge-forming tendencies occur within Kuhn's paradigm sequence. Drawing from autobiographical accounts, the paper argues genuine deradicalisation is a deep ideological self-transformation, a reconstruction of how a person comes to believe, named here transilience: the restoration of the capacity to build one's own worldview on one's own terms, with sharpened evidence scrutiny. It reframes why content-based interventions can backfire and points practice toward conditions for epistemic pluralism rather than supplying ‘corrected beliefs’.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Prevention: A Scoping Review of the Literature on Prevention-Oriented Strategic Communication

Joseph Stabile — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, scholars and practitioners have increasingly turned to the example of the public health community to inform efforts to prevent targeted violence and terrorism. Building on these efforts, this scoping review explores the state of the literature as it relates to the role of strategic communication in a public health-informed approach to prevention. More specifically, this review examines how strategic communication can support primordial prevention initiatives—especially efforts to normalize prevention-oriented approaches to dealing with the challenge of targeted violence and terrorism. To that end, this scoping review examines both the terrorism studies literature, as well as the cognate field of public health, to help identify potential models to further develop prevention-oriented strategic communication. Following the PRISMA framework for literature reviews, I sought out relevant scholarship through searches of the Scopus database, the gray literature, and field-specific journals. This process generated a total of 135 studies that met the inclusion criteria, which fell within five categories. The first category captures the nascent literature on the role of strategic communication specifically as it relates to targeted violence prevention. The remaining four categories capture themes within the broader public health literature, namely the importance of Establishing Baselines, Enhancing Perceptions of Preventability, Engaging Stakeholders, and Evaluation and Sustainability.

Understanding Radicalisation Vulnerability in a Prevent Channel Panel Cohort: A Mixed-Methods Study of 137 Individuals Known to Mental Health Services

Thomas Robinson, Katie Glennon — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Research examining individuals vulnerable to violent extremism before terrorist offending occurs remains limited, with much existing evidence derived from convicted offenders, imprisoned extremists, or retrospective analyses of completed attacks. This study addresses that gap through a mixed-methods analysis of 137 individuals known to a United Kingdom National Health Service mental health trust who were discussed within Prevent Channel Panels between February 2022 and August 2024. No singular profile of radicalisation vulnerability emerged. Instead, vulnerability reflected the convergence of youth, masculinity, neurodevelopmental needs, mental health difficulties, psychosocial adversity, social isolation, and extensive online engagement. Many participants presented with mixed, unclear, or unstable ideological positions, highlighting the complexity of contemporary vulnerability pathways. Across the cohort, recurring themes included belonging, identity, significance, recognition, certainty, purpose, and social connection. The findings support contemporary scholarship that conceptualises radicalisation as a multifactorial process shaped by interactions between individual experiences, social relationships, and ideological narratives. By providing rare empirical evidence from a pre-criminal prevention population, the study reinforces the importance of a functional understanding of radicalisation and the need for trauma-informed, neurodiversity-informed, relational, and person-centred approaches to prevention and safeguarding practice.

Counter Extremism Care: The Dutch Approach

Sophie van den Hoogen, Daan Weggemans, Arnold Mol, Arno van Dam — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Radicalization and violent extremism pose challenges that cut across the security, social care, and mental health domains. The evidence base on CVE has broadened, yet detailed accounts of multidisciplinary exit programs, and the characteristics of the people they support, remain scarce. Drawing on the case of the National Support Center for Extremism (NSCfE) in the Netherlands, this article asks how an integrated, multidisciplinary exit program organizes mental health, social, and spiritual care around individual cases, and who its clients are. The NSCfE brings together (forensic) mental health care, social work, and spiritual care to support desistance, disengagement, and, where possible, deradicalization among radicalized individuals and their families. Approaching extremism as a ‘wicked problem’ expressed across multiple life domains, the NSCfE integrates these disciplines in a strength-based model that links each domain (i.e., mental health, social functioning, and ideology) to targeted interventions and to shared goals of stabilization, resilience, and prosocial reintegration. We describe the organization's development from an ad hoc exit facility into structured, professionalized care delivered by an interdisciplinary team of case managers. The article describes its individual-counseling (“Forsa”) program and characterizes the demographic, sociological, and clinical heterogeneity of its clientele by retrospectively coding the anonymized case files of 69 individuals enrolled between 2016 and 2023. We situate this account alongside two earlier commissioned independent evaluations of the program and the current literature on CVE and exit programs. It thereby contributes practice-based evidence on how integrated, care-oriented CVE is organized, and specifies the longitudinal, outcome-focused research required to establish evidence-based practice.

Nihilistic Violent Extremism and Youth CVE Practice: Emerging Challenges for Assessment, Intervention and Service Delivery

Adrian Cherney, Steve Barracosa, Sarah Stevenson — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the emergence of nihilistic violent extremism (NVE) and its implications for contemporary countering violent extremism (CVE) frameworks. Drawing on evolving case evidence, the paper characterises NVE as a form of violence marked by fragmented motivations, misanthropic and dystopian narratives, and an emphasis on spectacle, affect, and notoriety in the absence of coherent extreme ideological commitments. Mainly involving young people, these cases are shaped by online subcultures and ecosystems, trauma, and developmental vulnerabilities, with violence functioning as a means of identity formation or expression rather than aimed to political change. The paper argues that NVE challenges core assumptions underpinning CVE systems, particularly those grounded in ideology-based thresholds for assessment, intervention, and service delivery. Through a practice-informed analysis, it identifies four key areas of strain: referral pathways, service provision complexity, clinical and risk assessment, and practitioner wellbeing. Existing tools and models are shown to be only partially fit for purpose, given their limited capacity to capture behavioural, developmental, and socio-digital drivers of violence associated with NVE. The paper concludes that responding effectively to NVE requires an increased focus on trauma-informed, developmentally grounded, systemic, and behaviourally focused approaches, alongside greater integration across services and enhanced support for frontline practitioners.