Share this Post

This textbook helps students analyse the causes of violent extremism using different disciplinary approaches, and suggests concrete solutions from those perspectives.

Why do individuals join violent extremist movements? This book approaches that question through seven disciplinary lenses: security, ideology, sociology, socio-economics, psychology, gender, and youth. Rather than privileging one explanation, it shows how these perspectives complement each other and why effective responses depend on combining them. This book is built on a simple premise: you cannot respond to violent extremism without first understanding what drives it. Each chapter maps the push and pull factors behind radicalisation and traces their implications for prevention, intervention, and rehabilitation. To show the frameworks at work on real lives, this book includes profiles of six individuals who became involved in extremist movements. Each chapter is structured to guide students through the material step by step, combining conceptual frameworks with case studies, real-world profiles, and discussion questions that push beyond comprehension into genuine debate. Written for students who want to think seriously about one of the most pressing security challenges of our time, this book offers both analytical depth and practical tools.

This book will be of great interest to students of political violence, sociology, psychology, criminology, International Relations, and public policy, as well as to practitioners working in counter-terrorism, preventing violent extremism, and the security sector.

Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh is a university professor, researcher and international consultant specializing in human security, prevention of violent extremism, counter-terrorism and peacebuilding with geographic specialization in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran.  She teaches Master’s Level courses on Human Security (since 2003) as well as courses on Understanding and Responding to Radicalization (since 2018) at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) at Sciences Po (Paris Institute of Political Studies, Paris). She has also taught at SIPA at Columbia University, School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and has been a visiting professor at universities in Tehran, Kabul, New Delhi, Pretoria, Moscow and Dushanbe.  Between 2010 and 2016 she was a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) working on the regional security complex around Afghanistan.  She founded a Center for Peace and Human Security at Sciences Po (2004-2008) and launched the first peer-reviewed, student run journal there, the Journal of Human Security (until 2008). She is currently preparing a textbook based on the course on Understanding Violent Extremism which she teaches at Sciences Po and at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.

Dr. Tadjbakhsh has also had an extensive career with the United Nations, both as staff in the 1990s at UNDP and since 2003 as a consultant conducting various trainings, evaluations and writing strategies on the themes of Prevention of Violent Extremism, Peacebuilding and Human Security with UNOCT, UNRCCA, OSCE, OHCHR, UNICEF, UN Women and UNDP etc.