Why do people engage in violent extremism? Why do people deem killing others as a reasonable way – the only reasonable way – to get their political voice heard? How do driving a cargo truck into crowds on a promenade or shooting at random believers in a mosque come to be seen as legitimate alternatives? The short answer is that we have no answer. However, over the last 20 years, radicalization has been the cornerstone concept used by academics, media and policymakers to describe how ordinary individuals become violent extremists. Radicalization outlines the process of embracing an extremist ideology and justifying or perpetrating violent actions in the name of such ideology. Originally, the purpose of this concept was to investigate the roots behind the series of jihadist terrorist attacks that shook the heart of Western democracies at the beginning of the 21st century. For instance, the train bombings of Madrid (2004) and London (2005) with a combined death toll of 249 civilians were not carried out by Islamists educated under the banner of Al-Qaeda sponsored madrassas but by second-generation immigrants born and raised within the liberal social fabric of the European Union. As a result, these attacks were labelled cases of homegrown terrorism and their causes were linked to the perpetrators “acting out” a violent Islamist ideology. Explanations harkening back to situational factors like group structure and settings were difficult to digest at that time, probably because it would have amounted to admitting that Western societies could prepare the structural soil conducive to jihadist terrorism. More comforting was framing the perpetrators as vulnerable individuals who fell prey to the luring speeches of unscrupulous recruiters (e.g., preachers, combatants) and led the former to reach the “tipping point” and turn the words into actions (Crone 2016).