ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the evidence base around the ambivalent role of violence within far-right and Islamist extremist groups. Based on existing literature as well as previous research containing primary data on the online discourse of nominally non-violent movements, we make the case that a significant ideological overlap exists between non-violent and violent groups, and that individuals move back and forth between such groups. In the context of an increasingly “post-organisational” extremism for which hierarchically organised groups are becoming less important, loose online extremist networks additionally provide a shared technological space for non-violent and violent extremists alike, and facilitate the overspill of acts of violence by small cells and lone-actors through more extreme interpretations of the calls to action contained within non-violent extremist ideologies. We subsequently analyse how non-violent extremist groups often take ambivalent stances towards violence. Drawing on the examples of the far-right ethno-nationalist group, Generation Identity and the revolutionary Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir we can see that despite not actively calling for violence, the relationship of such supposedly “non-violent” extremist movements with violent extremism remains ambivalent. Therefore, we argue that the distinction between non-violent and violent extremists is often not as clear-cut as the terminology may indicate, and suggest that the category of “non-violent extremism” has limited analytical value.
