Against retrotopia: Young people, social futures and resilience to violent extremism
Professor Michele Grossman
Social cohesion is often talked about as a measure of how well a society or community is placed to resist or mitigate the likelihood of violent extremism taking hold. But what do we mean when we talk about ‘social cohesion’ in relation to violent extremism? And what is the role of young people in fostering the kinds of social cohesion and social futures that can make a positive difference when it comes to building healthy communities that can resist appeals to violent radicalisation?
In this piece, I explore the relationship between social cohesion, social exclusivism, violent extremism and youth activism through community volunteering and intercultural dialogue.
1. Social cohesion
Without strengthening social cohesion, there is little hope of preventing violent extremism. Social cohesion at its root means fostering increased connection, understanding and solidarity between people from different backgrounds, faiths and traditions in pursuit of common goals around social wellbeing and thriving. The word ‘cohesion’ means, literally, ‘sticking together’.
As a concept, ‘social cohesion’ asks us to think about what it is that helps us ‘stick together’ and work toward common goals of social wellbeing despite our differences, rather than allowing those differences to divide us.
As a value set, ‘social cohesion’ asserts that the benefits of ‘sticking together’ in a community or society are more important, and bring greater satisfaction, rewards and security, than focusing on what sets us apart from each other.
As a practice, ‘social cohesion’ requires that we make the conscious effort to accept and work with, and through, our social and cultural differences in order to find and nurture the common ground we share. For example, this common ground might revolve around the fair distribution of social goods, or about how our societies should be governed, or about how vulnerable members of our communities should be treated by various institutions and systems.
Five elements of social cohesion
At all three levels – concept, value, and practice – social cohesion is underpinned by five key elements identified by Jenson in 1998. These five elements are:
Belonging: shared values, collective identities, community belonging
Inclusion: equal opportunities and access to labour market and other key institutions
Participation: involvement and civic/political engagement
Recognition: acceptance and recognition of diversity
Legitimacy: legitimacy of institutions that mediate conflicts in a pluralistic society
These five elements of belonging, inclusion, participation, recognition and legitimacy form the bedrock of any society’s ability to manage its existence in peaceful and constructive ways. Take one or more of these away in any meaningful sense, and our ability to prevent or build resilience to violent extremism becomes more precarious and less viable. This is so because most of the social and political grievances that lead to violent conflict around the world, past and present, originate when sense of belonging and inclusion, the ability to participate in civic or political decision-making, the ability to be recognised and accepted, or the legitimacy of our institutions becomes fragile or threatened.
That is why ‘strengthening social cohesion’ is a necessary pre-condition to preventing violent extremism, as I will go on to explore.
At its best, social cohesion means not just sticking together with people who are like you. It means reaching out and connecting to others who are not like you in order to find and nourish the common ground you share, and to better understand, accept and value the diversity that characterises so many of our communities today.
2. Social exclusivism
But what is the opposite of social cohesion? There are different ways of answering this question, but my own response is to say that the opposite of social cohesion is social exclusivism. In a 2016 systematic review on social cohesion, community resilience and violent extremism, we defined social exclusivism in this way:
Exclusivism is used as an umbrella term for a set of attitudes and actions informed by the assumption of inequality between groups and especially the superiority of one’s own group. Exclusivist viewpoints tend to define group boundaries in rigid terms based on assumed fixed sets of values, traits and ‘in/out’ criteria. Not all forms of exclusivism [are necessarily socially harmful, but some are. These include] manifestations of exclusivism, for example, racism and violent extremism, that aim to humiliate, denigrate and/or harm others based on their actual or perceived membership of or identification with a particular ethnic, racial, cultural or religious group.
Social exclusivism is what happens when social cohesion is fragile, threatened or in short supply. In fact, social exclusivism is a key threat to social cohesion.
Exclusivism creates a sense of belonging only for those in the ‘in’ group, and forbids belonging to anyone who does not meet the ‘in group’ criteria. Far from being inclusive, it excludes not just many others, but any ‘others’. It creates structures in which participation is either uneven or virtually impossible for those who are not members of the ‘in group’. It fails to recognise or accept those who are different, and it de-legitimates any social institution that aims at inclusive or human rights-based governance and distribution of social goods.
Social exclusivism is a form of social organisation, in other words, that seeks to legitimate itself by making illegitimate any form of difference. While not all forms of exclusivism lead to violence, some of them can. At its worst, social exclusivism can legitimate violent conflict as a means of achieving its goal to empower one group – whether social, political, religious, cultural or ethnic – by disempowering others – as we saw, for example, through the tragedy of the 2019 Christchurch massacre.
3. Preventing violent extremism: I
Many of the global challenges we face today focus on the rise of violence as a means of resolving social and political grievances, or of legitimating and asserting the supposed moral or political superiority of one group at the expense of others. While it may be tempting to focus on violent extremism inspired by one or another political or ideological movement or position, in my view, this would be a mistake. We face a global rise in many forms of violence, not just those commonly associated in the public consciousness with violent extremism or terrorism. This includes violence against women in both public and private spheres; domestic intergenerational violence; violence against the aged; violence against refugees and migrants; violence against LGBTI individuals and groups; criminal violence; and violence by states against their own citizens and against citizens of other countries.
But we also face a rise in the legitimation of violence by various institutions and voices of authority, and a rise in the sensationalising of violence by some facets of global media.
These interlocking features promote an environment in which the legitimation of various forms of social violence has become more complex to unpack and contest.
However, some aspects of the ways in which social violence functions are not really that complicated. Violence as a solution to social or political grievances and adversities emerges when other means of resolving conflicts are either unavailable, unsupported or have limited credibility and legitimacy for substantial minorities, or indeed sometimes majorities (for example, during the apartheid regime in South Africa), within any given community or society. Violence as a solution also emerges where there are not enough strong voices marshalled against it; when people are too frightened or too complacent or too preoccupied to speak out and bear witness either to the harms caused by any form of social violence, or to the alternatives that can be mobilised to peacefully and constructively mediate and resolve conflicts.
4. The role of young people in strengthening social cohesion
And this is where young people come in, with their demonstrated capacity for leadership, for innovation, for creativity and for courage.
We know from the literature on social and community resilience that a really important feature of community resilience lies not just in getting the help you need when you are vulnerable, but also in giving help to others in need because we feel we have enough to share without robbing ourselves of tangible or intangible resources. When we share our time, our expertise, our energy, resources and goodwill, the social benefits extend to the giver, and not just the recipient, of volunteering initiatives. Whether this takes on the characteristics of formal or informal volunteering, the social benefits are the same.
Volunteering actually has stronger roots in many communities than is visible, as a recent study on Australian Muslim volunteering in local communities has demonstrated. However, much local community giving by young people flies under the radar, in part because our understanding of ‘volunteering’ continues to lag behind the myriad of forms in which contemporary giving, sociality and connectivity can take place amongst youth.
Volunteering is not just about joining a charity or organisation that is already well-recognised on the national or world stage, though that can also be a good thing to do. As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted, it can be about weekly shopping for the elderly on your street, or tutoring in a refugee program on the weekends; donating your time to an online chat forum for disengaged youth, or designing a new social media campaign to highlight alternatives to various forms of social violence. It can be about starting a community garden that brings you into contact with people from many different cultures and languages, or teaching others your own language. And so many young people are already doing so many of these things, in both visible and less visible ways.
At the heart of these various activities lie the many different ways in which young people are taking the lead in forging social and community bonds that help bring peace and wellbeing to others, as well as creating new ideas and avenues for volunteering efforts both local and global.
These different dimensions of volunteering are vital to understand because they all return to the key principles of social cohesion. Volunteering activities can help both givers and receivers to feel that they belong to their community; that they are included and recognised; that they can participate, and that the society in which they live recognises and legitimates their efforts to contribute what they can, and to receive the support they need with dignity rather than a sense of shame or inadequacy.
5. Intercultural dialogue
However, sharing with and giving to others is not the only way in which to foster social cohesion by reaching out to different others. Intercultural dialogue – literally, finding ways to talk to each other across and in acceptance of, rather than resistance to, our cultural differences – can also take many forms, and this is a second essential component of social cohesion and community resilience against social harms, including harmful forms of social exclusivism.
Meaningful engagement and interaction with socio-culturally different others offers rich opportunities to expand our understanding and acceptance of cultural differences, and to promote this understanding to others. Conversely, however, encounters with cultural difference – especially in dense urban settings that are transitioning from cultural homogeneity to cultural diversity, as we see occurring in different parts of the world – can sometimes create uncertainty and anxiety. These anxieties and uncertainties – for example, about how to behave, resource competition, and sharing spaces with unfamiliar others – can lead to viewing cultural differences as inherently threatening and anti-social.
Left unchecked, such anxieties and fears can in turn take us back to social exclusivism as a coping mechanism. In its most extreme form, coping through social exclusivism can turn into what the noted sociologist Zygmunt Baumann terms retrotopia: a belief that a return to an idealised past – past values, past cultures, past behaviours and institutions and systems to recover the supposed lost ‘glory’ of past days – is the best way to reshape the future.
Retrotopic yearnings are almost always based, as he demonstrates, on fundamental social inequalities, socially exclusive tribalisms and collective forms of narcissism that disavow and denigrate otherness in many ways.
The past is a foreign country, said L. P. Hartley in his 1953 novel, The Go-Between, and he was right. We can perhaps learn its language, but we can never speak it like a native, because its time is not our time. To claim otherwise is to deny not only the present, but the future.
The importance of dialogue – formal and informal, through education or media, between individuals or in large groups – lies in its ability to strengthen knowledge, insight and understanding as an antidote to ignorance, myths and fears about those who we experience as ‘other’. These myths and fears are the raw materials of racism, of ethnic and cultural stereotyping, of exclusion and humiliation, and of the many forms of social violence that I mentioned above. They grow and thrive when slogans and propaganda replace knowledge and critical literacy, and they are also the raw materials used to legitimate narratives of social violence, including violent extremism.
By contrast, intercultural dialogue is a bridge between self and other, and between different collective others. When intercultural dialogue is respectful, constructive and aimed at genuine understanding and the non-violent negotiation of conflict and difference, it can lead to truly remarkable outcomes for peace and stability. When intercultural dialogue is stymied, however, the void it leaves can be filled by voices aiming to create not peace and stability but disruption and conflict.
6. Preventing violent extremism: II
But how do things like volunteering and intercultural dialogue relate to young people’s capacity to build resilience to violent extremism? As we’ve learned from Mark Sageman and others, social influence toward the embracing of violent extremism is disseminated most effectively through social networks; radicalisation to violence tends to take hold of its targets most deeply through peer networks and relationships. Extremist narratives justifying and glorifying violence as a solution to a host of social, political and existential ills exploit all the deficits of social cohesion that can beset some young people in different communities: lack of belonging, inclusion, participation, recognition and legitimacy.
Young people as experts against extremism
Young people are the unbeaten experts when it comes to knowing how to reach their peers, and how to combat ignorance and propaganda with creativity, flair and authenticity. They are also experts in understanding how to develop and implement alternatives to violence of many kinds – including violent extremism – that will resonate with other young people who are looking for intelligent, meaningful and achievable answers and solutions, rather than lofty promises or empty spin.
Time and again, we have seen that against seemingly intractable social and political forces and odds, it is the power of young people to mobilise at a grassroots level, and across horizontal rather than vertical forms of social power, that has brought about the change we seek. This has occurred through youth-based social networks and social influences that have, in recent decades, stopped wars and started social movements that we take for granted today. As one of Australia’s most iconic songs says: from little things big things grow.
Professor Michele Grossman, CRIS Director, is Research Chair in Diversity and Community Resilience at Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, where she also convenes the AVERT Research Network.