Critical Reflexions on “Composite”, “Fused”, or “Mixed, Unclear and Unstable” Extremist Ideologies (and Concepts)

Over the past few years, cases of violence apparently inspired by unclear or hybrid ideological motivations seem to have multiplied in OECD countries, prompting scholarly debates, law-enforcement worries, and, more recently, political declarations. Particularly striking or lethal instances that receive significant media coverage are the visible part of an iceberg made of a wealth of less spectacular – and reported – cases (foiled plots, prosecutions for preparation of acts of terrorism, police investigations, etc.).

Among the most visible cases, Philip Manshaus (the Oslo shooter), Tobias Rathjen (Hanau), Mauricio Garcia (Allen), and Juraj Krajčík (Bratislava) all blended misogynistic, incel, or anti-LGBT themes with far-right topics in their online footprints and manifestos. Devon Arthurs identified as a ‘Salafist National-Socialist’ when leading the “Attomwaffen Division” neo-Nazi network, while the inspirations of Omar Al-Kattoul and Christopher Joseph included Salafi-jihadism, white supremacism, and school shooters fandom. The O9A collective’s pseudo-satanist meta-ideology advocates violent action regardless of its ideological justification, and much attention has recently been paid to the Terrorgram (to which Krajčík was connected) and “764” digital networks.

Law-enforcement has coined new concepts to account for such cases into their broader terrorism frameworks. Famously, former FBI Director Christopher Wren referred to “salad-bar” ideologies to characterize offenders’ “mish-mash of different ideologies that don’t fit together”, while the UK Home Office (HO) promoted the “Mixed, Unclear, and Unstable” (MUU) ideology classification, as well as the “conflicted ideology” and “vulnerability but no ideology or CT risk” categories. These concepts have immediately been “filled” upon integration into the HO’s Prevent statistics; for example, in the year ending March 2023, about 2,500 of the 6,800 referrals (around 37%) fell into the latter category, and about half that amount (about 18%) into the former.

Scholars have similarly sought to construct concepts and typologies. Koch documented the convergence of several radical ideologies in the making of the O9A, characterizing this process as “fused extremism”. Seeking to clarify the situation, Gartenstein-Ross and colleagues argued that “fused” extremism was but one distinct form of “composite violent extremism”, alongside “ambiguous”, “mixed”, and “convergent” types. With Lewys Brace and Debbie Ging, I privileged the MUU concept to emphasize mechanisms of digital ideological connections. The George Washington University Program on Extremism’s report on The Age of Incoherence adopted several terms including that of “fringe fluidity”, and the University of Liverpool recently launched an initiative aiming to “conceptualise, understand, and prevent” what they call “mixed forms of extremism”.

All these conceptual and typological developments make a linear epistemological claim: there is a reality that ought to be categorized as precisely as possible. Yet I argue that something else is going on. From Foucault to Searle and from Quine to Wittgenstein, most philosophers of language warn against such naïve one-way “correspondence” and instead insist that words are connected to reality in more a complex fashion: they performatively alter it, they belong to epistemic structures of politically situated knowledge, etc. I therefore suggest adopting towards these concepts a more critical stance seeking to unpack some of these less obvious connections and effects.

More specifically, I propose to use the broadly Foucauldian stance already deployed for terrorism more generally by the likes Richard Jackson. At its core, this approach reflects and interrogates the concepts we use to refer to real-world events and phenomena labelled as “terrorist” (itself of course an “essentially contested concept”) by insisting that these concepts 1) performatively produce political effects, mostly in terms of reinforcing security dispositives and promoting contestable hard security measures that marginalize weaker individuals and communities, and 2) belong to broader, historically-situated social practices and discourses, meaning that attuning solely to proximal causes is insufficient to diagnose and react to “MUU”, “fluid”, or “composite” extremisms. I follow these two tracks successively below, without denying the reality of either extremism or violence – this is a common strawman argument waged against critical (terrorism) studies.

Attuning to the effects of MUU categorization

While usually demonstrating a genuine attempt to enable CVE/CT services to respond to serious offenses, the concepts and typologies presented above carry a risk that should be well-known to terrorism scholars: that of expanding the “terrorism” definition to encompass cases rather far from the most consensual criteria – above all the ideological/political motivation and goal – and “terrorist” archetype. Already, law-enforcements definitions have undergone highly contestable bloating over the past two decades, with the UK for example including damage to infrastructure and the mere threat of violence within the realm of “terrorism”, or the US including several narco cartels and gangs in its list of “terrorist organizations”. The MUU and similar categories risk contributing to this sprawling labelling; a first warning sign has been the UK government’s recent push for revising the terrorism legislation so that it can accommodate for cases like Axel Rudakubana’s killing of young girls in Southport (UK), where ideological motivation was very thin to say the least.

In a commentary of the Southport case, Richards drew attention to the fact that psychological factors are critical in cases sitting at the increasingly blurred intersection of terrorism and non-political violence, argued that ideology is in many instances not the determining cause, and rightly pointed out that the UK’s Prevent was “not destined to deal with apolitical and apparently random attacks on people unknown to the perpetrator”. However, his recommendation was surprisingly not to resist conflation, but instead to merge both types of crime into a single “unified approach to all violent attacks on the public” – a proposition inadvertently playing the game of terrorism maximalists. Rousseau and colleagues’ careful examination of cases of radical behaviour is more productive in its observation that “non-ideological violence” dominates: most of these young individuals, they note, are attracted by a nihilistic power-seeking worldview that encourages the consumption of, and cynical commentary on, extreme violence from whatever source – ideological or not. Indeed whilst the digital footprints of many individuals who fell into MUU and similar categories usually contain some ideologically marked extremist content (such as a jihadist manual for Rudakubana), this content is typically swamped within non-ideological material such as gore videos or crime reports and fandom discussions. In the trial for terrorism of Gabrielle Friel, a few years ago in Scotland, the jury faced a young man who planned a crossbow attack and had seen the video of incel killer Elliot Rodger – this prompted terrorism charges. Yet he was also consuming lots of violent yet non-political content (school shooting chatrooms, crime stories, etc.), and participated into fringe forums that had little to do with violence. While acknowledging the “terror” aspect of the plot, the jury was simultaneously reluctant to conflate this person with the likes of Bin Laden or Rodger himself.

Expanding the legal (and scholarly) definition of terrorism to “unclear” or “unstable” cases, let alone to cases with minimal or no ideological footprint, is no theoretical matter. Not only do terrorism charges bring more severe sentences, but the use of the “terrorist” label in the media and public sphere is known to trigger anxiety and induce support for hard security measures to tackle the problem – as opposed to, for instance, community or counselling tools (this is something we experimentally demonstrated a few years ago). Even though it might make sense to include – with great care – into the definition and understanding of terrorism categories such as “fused” or hybrid”, we should resist a maximalist expansion towards cases that are “unclear”, “unstable”, “ambiguous”, “fluid”, or even – quite an oxymoron – “non-ideological”. Doing so will only reinforce the counterproductive criminalization of individuals who first and foremost need well-funded psychological and social support.

Adapting to the broader causes of MUU ideologies – and concepts

Coming to grips with the phenomenon, the emerging literature has inevitably attempted to highlight causal pathways. Gartenstein-Ross and colleagues for instance see three main explanations: the way online spaces structure digital information environments, the fact that extremist networks have become more decentralized and fragmented, and a tendency for individuals involved to graft ideological gloss on a primary attraction to violence and nihilism (which is echoed by Rousseau and colleagues, see above). Using the PIRUS (Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the US) dataset, Meleagrou-Hitchens and Ayad’s Age of Incoherence report connect it to another trend: the rise of profiles not affiliated with a terrorist or extremist group,[1] but radicalized online through digital explorations. Incoherence is thus a product of bottom-up lone radicalization as opposed to a necessarily more coherent and corralled top-down indoctrination. In our paper with Lewys Brace and Debbie Ging, which asked “where do MUU ideologies come from?”, we suggested that this phenomenon results from the interplay of three mechanisms, each located at a different level. Specific technological affordances like outlinking and one-click access to neighbouring political and cultural milieux (structural level) allow a minority of individuals to “exopost” others towards different ideological digital ecosystems (individual level), a practice boosted by external events such as the Covid lockdown or, more recently, Trump’s election and Musk’s transformation of X/Twitter (societal level).

All these causal mechanisms overlap, and are certainly valid. However, they are merely proximal facilitators of a phenomenon which is one variant of a much broader social development. When it comes to the reality of “mixed” or “fluid” extremist ideologies, we must be wary of keeping the lens too close – and the concepts we use to describe it too artificially cut from the larger context. When we learn that Krajčík’s manifesto and digital footprint included Nazi, misogynistic, and anti-trans language and visuals, all blended with tropes from non-political neighbouring digital spaces such as porn anime, we should see more in this case than “composite” extremism ideology. The same applies when we consider the disturbing prose of the Antioch shooter Henderson, where we find admiration for Krajčík and Brenton Tarrant and promotion of neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideas, alongside gimmicks taken from the Soyjak Party “chan”-like image-board. These individuals and their ideas are not merely the accidental products of an unfortunate combination of a couple of platforms’ affordances being exploited by nefarious influence entrepreneurs during a particular three or four months-long context.

Already, Rousseau and colleague’s clinical work broadened the lens by positing a “generational effect” underpinning the phenomenon. I suggest zooming out even further and consider the kind of “mish-mash” (to use Wren’s words) kaleidoscopic ideological collages of the likes of Garcia, Henderson, or Krajčík to be no less than slightly distorting mirrors of our times. “Mixed” or “unstable” ideological pathways and constructs are not an anomaly or “sick” aberration, but rather, I would argue, typical emanations of four tendencies found across todays’ society. First, these constructs belong to the growing scepticism against authority and “elites” fuelled by populist currents, which promotes a bottom-up, experiential self-construction of truth (typically infused with conspiratorial claims and pseudo-enlightened “revelations”) against the perceptions associated by the lambasted “mainstream”. Second, MUU manifestos and digital footprints reflect our fast-pace social, informational, and work environments where deep and long intellectual engagement is made increasingly impossible and digital platforms based on fast content consumption encourage shallow, quick ideological bites and provocative punchlines. Third, this phenomenon is one particular form, among many, of the ultra-individualisation characterizing neoliberal societies, whereby people are encouraged to exist and be seen in an “original” way (pre-tailored through marketing) instead of conforming to a single dominant mould, and whereby (pre-formatted) “shocking” stunts are what captures the attention. MUU extremist ideologies, in that sense, are but one aspect of MUU ideologies more generally and shallow social and political engagement in a troubled era. The title of Meleagrou-Hitchens and Ayad’s report – The Age of Incoherence – is therefore aptly chosen, if understood in the most encompassing way. Finally, since most cases of “fused” or “hybrid” extremist ideologies cases actually incorporate far-right and some form of male-supremacist tropes, there is actually some form of coherence uniting them for which we would need a proper ideological label that does not hide the general salience of these two highly compatible (and increasingly mixed) currents. Anna Meier further argues that the very labelling of “fused” or “hybrid” functions to mask a reality that our societies struggle to admit: the growth of white supremacism and hard patriarchal norms.

From this perspective, the scientific and law-enforcement typologies and concepts we coin to capture what’s going on with killers and extremists ought to be interrogated, as they silo scholarly and practical work into the kind of purely instrumental, technical form of knowledge which has famously been opposed by the Frankfurt School to a broader, more transversal critical knowledge aiming at unlocking emancipation. Itself a mirror of our society’s fragmentation of work into technical specializations, the narrow lens on “MUU” extremism belongs to the same shallow logic of the crime it fights, and is thus at risk of reinforcing mostly repressive dispositives instead of unlocking social progress.

Conclusions

In this blog, I have tried to think beyond the usual, largely instrumental and epistemologically simplistic view of the rise in violence and hate inspired by “mixed”, “unclear”, “unstable”, or “unstable” extremist ideologies. Building on a typical framework for critique inspired by philosophies of language and critical terrorism studies has enabled me to shed light on the phenomenon from two other, criss-crossing angles. This new interpretation remains clumsy and underdeveloped, and should therefore be understood as a provocative way to step back from our own fast-paced, often unreflective work, and to think reflectively about the underpinnings and implications or our newest concepts and empirical work.

[1] This database reports a 311% growth, in the past decade compared to five decades earlier, of the number of radicalized individuals with no allegiance or ties to a recognized group, with today more individuals without a known affiliation than with a formal tie.