The Radicalisation of the West

Inside the pressures, platforms, and politics that turn grievance into ideology

How an ordinary life closes in until certainty feels like salvation. How grievance becomes identity. How identity becomes a crowd. This is the story of a continent that is losing confidence in its own middle ground, and of the quiet majority learning to live with raised voices.

Prologue: The Lamp in the Window

Rain needles a small terrace in Sparkbrook, Birmingham. Inside, a cheap desk lamp throws a cone of light across a rented living room where Adam Malik, twenty-four, refreshes a feed that never ends. The carpet holds the day’s damp. The air carries the flat heat of a microwave dinner. Above the sofa a framed college certificate has begun to curl at the corners. IT support, merit. The promise in the frame feels like a joke.

On his cracked phone screen a presenter leans towards the camera and cuts through nuance with a single, unwavering gaze. The chat beneath fills with certainty. Names to blame. Enemies to watch. Patterns to connect and fear. Adam’s thumb hesitates, then follows another channel that promises the truth others will not say. He tells himself this is only curiosity. He tells himself he is just catching up.

Outside, the streetlight flickers and hums. Inside, a soft ping announces a new video. The voice on screen asks if he is ready to see what the media hides. Adam turns the lamp a fraction brighter and leans in. The picture sharpens. So does he.

The question that will follow him through this story is painfully simple. When does attention harden into belief, and belief into belonging?

What We Mean When We Say Radical

Precision matters. Democratic life depends on the line between speech that should be protected and conduct that must be stopped.

Radical ideas are disruptive proposals for social or political change. They can be unpopular or offensive and still deserve protection when they do not incite crime or support violence. Radicalisation is a process rather than a single act. The European Commission describes it as a phased movement in which a person or group embraces an ideology that accepts or condones violence for political or ideological ends. The definition is descriptive rather than criminal. It signals risk and invites prevention. Prevention of radicalisation

Extremism, in current United Kingdom policy, is sharper. On 14 March 2024 the Government adopted a new definition: the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance that seeks to negate the rights of others, undermine or replace the democratic system, or create a permissive environment for those outcomes. It is guidance that shapes engagement and funding decisions rather than a criminal threshold, but its implications for civic space are significant. Government strengthens approach to counter extremism / New definition of extremism (2024)

Terrorism, by contrast, is defined in law. Section one of the Terrorism Act 2000 sets out the use or threat of serious action intended to influence government or intimidate the public for an ideological cause. That line activates the coercive powers of arrest, charge and imprisonment. Terrorism Act 2000

These distinctions are not academic. Protecting lawful activism sustains pluralism. Identifying extremism without criminalising ideas helps public bodies avoid legitimising groups that erode rights. Proving terrorism secures convictions when violence or its threat is joined to ideological purpose. Much of our contemporary argument sits in the grey space between the second and the third.

Adam does not know any of this vocabulary. He only knows that his anger now has a language, and that language has a crowd.

A Short History of Long Waves

The faces in Adam’s feed feel new because the medium is new, but the pattern is old.

Anarchists at the turn of the twentieth century promised liberation from oppressive states. Their assassinations and bombs produced panic, repression and a harsher state. Fascists in the 1920s promised national rebirth but delivered totalitarian rule and mass murder. Revolutionary communists promised equality and ushered in gulags and purges, while their Western offshoots turned to kidnappings and shootings. After 2001, jihadists framed a global narrative of victimhood and revenge that translated into attacks from Madrid to London to Paris. The cycles shared the same arc: a shining promise, disappointment, closed groups, violence, suppression, then a long echo that later movements recycled.

Europol’s Terrorism Situation and Trend Report for 2024 confirms that today’s landscape inside the European Union is dominated by small, self-directed cells and individuals who often radicalise online, sometimes across borders and languages, and who require little in the way of physical infrastructure. In 2023, twenty-two member states reported 426 arrests for terrorist offences, with most arrests linked to jihadist terrorism and a continuing presence of right-wing, left-wing and separatist threats. The report’s core warning is about diffusion. Plots now incubate in smaller spaces with faster timelines. Europol

If the arc is familiar, the accelerant is not. Adam’s world is lit by a screen that rewards heat over light.

The Soil: Money, Rent, Time

Radicalisation does not drop fully formed into a stable life. It germinates where social trust has thinned.

Across the European Union the housing cost overburden rate, the share of people spending at least forty per cent of disposable income on housing, stood at 8.8 per cent in 2023. In Greece it reached 28.5 per cent. Germany registered 13.0 per cent. Denmark 15.4 per cent. These are not abstract percentages. They are the distance between wages and walls. Living conditions in Europe

Pessimism about the next generation compounds the strain. A global Pew survey published in January 2025 found that a median of 57 per cent of respondents across twenty-four countries believed children would grow up financially worse off than their parents. A median of 34 per cent expected them to be better off. That perception does not automatically produce radicalism. It does lower the temperature at which conspiracy begins to boil. Pew Research Center

Adam’s story fits that template. The jobs he trained for became rolling agency contracts. Rent advanced. Savings retreated. The more precarious his position felt, the more attractive simple explanations became.

Belonging and the Quiet Pull of Certainty

Economics opens the door. Loneliness invites the guest inside. In Britain, recent polling by the Office for Students captured a different form of isolation on campus. One in five academics reported that they did not feel free to teach controversial topics. Students reported difficulty engaging with contested issues. When people feel that important conversations are unavailable in public, they look for them elsewhere. Office for Students / The Independent

Online communities supply the missing warmth. The jokes that first drew Adam in began to double as tests of loyalty. He laughed, then repeated them. The repetition built a new identity. Leaving the chat would now mean leaving the only space where he felt recognised. Certainty was part of the attraction. The world was made neat, and so was he.

The Platform Effect

The most robust description of the digital accelerant remains a 2018 study in Science by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Analysing one hundred and twenty-six thousand cascades of rumour on Twitter, they found that false news spread farther, faster and more broadly than true news, and that the effect was most pronounced for political content. Novelty attracted attention. Attention rewarded outrage. Science / MIT Sloan

The European Union’s Digital Services Act now obliges the largest platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks, including risks linked to disinformation and radicalisation, and provides a framework for vetted researchers to access platform data. The law is new. Its test will be practical access and enforcement. The Digital Services Act / Questions and answers on the Digital Services Act

In Adam’s case the mechanics are simple. A video about housing costs led to a harsher video about elites, then to a channel that blurred grievance with menace, then to groups that mixed news with calls to action. The path from curiosity to conviction had an algorithmic slope.

Classrooms, Town Halls and the Street

Radicalisation feeds on places where talk falters. In universities, the regulator has begun to use new powers. In March 2025 the Office for Students fined the University of Sussex for failures linked to freedom of speech and academic freedom after a long investigation into campus protests and policy. The case is contested. It signals a new willingness by the state to police the boundary between safety and speech. The Guardian

In town halls the same tension reappears. Some residents demand more interventions against what they see as hatred. Others fear the chill of overreach. The question is one of balance rather than absolutes. Close the space too tightly and you drive people underground. Leave it unmanaged and bad actors flood the zone.

Crime, Fear and the Justice Gap

Public safety is the foundation on which trust sits. When people believe the justice system cannot protect them, hardline movements gain legitimacy.

Home Office statistics for outcomes in England and Wales show persistently low charge rates for many categories of crime and long backlogs in the courts, worsened by the pandemic and only slowly improving. The details vary by offence. The perception is simpler. Justice delayed feels like justice denied. Crime outcomes in England and Wales 2024 to 2025

Hate crime numbers add another layer of heat. The Home Office bulletin for the year ending March 2023 recorded more than one hundred and forty thousand hate crimes in England and Wales, with racial offences forming the largest share. Subsequent figures reported by the Home Office for the following year showed religious hate crimes at record levels, driven by a surge in offences following the Israel/Hamas war. Each community reads these numbers through its own wounds. The aggregate effect is mistrust. Hate crime, England and Wales / FT

Radicals exploit the gap between statistics and fear. For Adam the message is simple. The system will not protect you. We will.

Money and the Message

Follow the money and you will often find the megaphone. In Brussels the EU Transparency Register and watchdogs like Transparency International EU have highlighted the limits of current disclosure. A dense ecosystem of foundations, consultancies and media outlets shapes narratives that travel with the speed of advertising. Foreign governments use these channels to seed division at little cost. The point is not a conspiracy theory. It is a structural observation. Sustained spending on a story makes that story visible. Visibility changes what the public believes is normal.

The details are visible on the surface if you look. Company registries reveal directors who drift between media startups and political campaigns. Donation records show clusters around flashpoint issues. Open source research can be dry work, but it draws a clear map of how fringe claims become common sense.

Law and Speech

In Britain the Online Safety Act of 2023 created new duties for platforms to remove illegal content and reduce risks linked to illegal activity, with Ofcom empowered to enforce codes of practice and levy heavy fines. Supporters see a long overdue framework. Critics warn of hidden costs for privacy and research access. Both recognise that enforcement choices will determine whether the law protects or chills. Online Safety Act / Ofcom

The risk is a two-sided cliff. If regulation becomes overbroad, people like Adam experience it as proof that they are being silenced. If it is toothless, spaces that incubate harm continue to grow. The Digital Services Act sets a similar balance at EU level. The settlement is not stable. It will be argued case by case.

The Pathway, Step by Step

Across ideologies the journey repeats. A trigger such as humiliation, job loss or a perceived insult. Vulnerability through isolation. Exposure to content that speaks in absolutes. Reinforcement inside a group that rewards obedience and punishes doubt. Mobilisation that shifts identity from private belief to public cause. Action that may be speech, financing, travel, or violence.

Europol’s 2024 report again matters here. It documents how plots now originate in small groups or lone actors with online mentors rather than formal organisations with offices and dues. It is a story about scale. A living room and a phone are enough.

Adam is somewhere in the middle of this path. He has not crossed any legal line. He has crossed a social one. Friends who do not share his new certainty have fallen away.

What Works, What Does Not

Prevention is cheaper than prosecution. It is also more humane. It requires patience and proof.

The Danish city of Aarhus developed a model that combined early intervention with an exit programme for those already embedded in violent networks. The approach used mentors, family engagement, education and employment support. Evaluations and practice papers show promising reductions in reoffending and a path back into ordinary life, while also warning about limits and the difficulty of attributing causality in complex social programmes. Utrecht University / Aarhus model / Utrecht University / Retsudvalget

Germany’s federally supported advice centres and civil society projects have built an infrastructure for disengagement. A 2023 evaluation for the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees assessed two advice centres and identified practices associated with better outcomes, including sustained case work and close cooperation with families. Meta-evaluations caution that hard proof is scarce, but the direction of travel is constructive. BAMF / SFS Journals

Universities that defend open debate while teaching debate literacy reduce the appeal of underground echo chambers. Police who work with communities rather than only against offenders build the procedural justice that research links to compliance. Platforms that provide access for vetted researchers under the Digital Services Act improve public understanding of risk. The gains are incremental. The effects are real. esfri.eu

The lesson from failures is sharper. Programmes that treat ideology without addressing isolation tend to stall. Policies that cast nets too wide alienate precisely the communities that prevention needs. Cuts to youth services snip the web of belonging that could have held Adam before he drifted.

Scenes of the State

In a police operations room on a damp Thursday in the West Midlands, a wall of screens shows a slow scroll of street cameras and incident logs. A detective sergeant points to a name that has appeared across different chats and protests. The threshold question is whether this is a person of interest or a person in need. There is no algorithm for that decision. The wrong call either way has a cost.

In a university office in Sussex, a lecturer opens an email from a student who says a topic is too painful to discuss. In a second email another student claims the same seminar is a cover for indoctrination. The lecturer closes the laptop and stares at the rain. Somewhere between those two emails is the space where a citizen learns to be a citizen.

In Adam’s living room, the desk lamp hums.

The Human Thread

This is not a story about the worst thing that could happen. It is a story about the more likely thing. A life narrows. A voice grows louder in the ear. The public square feels hostile, so the private square on a screen becomes home. The next step is not inevitable. It is easier than it used to be.

Adam’s mother texts to ask about work. Adam lies. He is not proud of the lie. He sends a link that will confirm his new view of the world. She does not click it.

The Question We Plant, The Answer We Owe

Here is the question we planted in the first third. When does attention harden into belief, and belief into belonging. The answer is not a date. It is a pattern. Attention hardens when there is no trusted place to test it. Belief becomes belonging when a community rewards obedience more than doubt. The remedy is therefore civic rather than only coercive. It looks like early help rather than late punishment. It looks like police who know names and teachers who can host difficult talk. It looks like platforms that turn down the reward for rage, and regulators who enforce with credible evidence rather than gestures. It looks like mentoring schemes that quietly reconnect a young man to work and meaning before his world becomes a tunnel.

A Square at Dusk

Months later, Adam stands at the edge of Victoria Square as a rally gathers around the statue and the council house. Flags snap in the breeze. Chants roll and echo. He watches for a long time and does not step forward. On his phone, a notification announces a new upload. On the sandstone behind him the light thins and lengthens.

The future of this square does not belong to Adam alone. It belongs to the platforms that decide which voices are amplified and which are buried. It belongs to the police who must choose whether a name in a chat log is an investigation or a conversation. It belongs to ministers who can invest in prevention or allow austerity to hollow out the services that keep people anchored.

And it belongs to you. Will you leave the square to those who shout loudest, or will you enter it with patience, fairness, and argument? Will you treat silence as safety, or as surrender? Will you demand that platforms prove their accountability, that governments measure their policies by trust as well as control, and that communities build spaces where recognition is stronger than rage?

The square is never empty. The only question is who will stand in it tomorrow, and on what terms.