Search results

This chapter draws upon empirical data collected with former violent extremists in the UK to address the phenomenological attractions of engaging in terrorism. We argue that there needs to be more consideration of the attractions of belonging to a terrorist organization and a more thorough appreciation of the experiences that attract people to acts of terrorism. This chapter begins to address these issues by engaging with Jack Katz's (1988) research on the phenomenological foreground, the compelling and seductive qualities of engaging in criminal acts. Katz's highly original and influential research shifts attention away from traditional criminological approaches that emphasize structural background factors such as class, unemployment, gender, poverty, or education. As Katz argues, this structural level of analysis overlooks the subjective phenomenological feelings that accompany criminal behavior. We argue that this is a serious omission as it is precisely the search for thrill, risk, and intense excitement that can serve to motivate further acts of criminality.

This article explores aspects of separation from “post-traditional” religiosity characteristic of certain late/post-modern affiliations. To do so, I analyze in-depth interviews with 44 individuals who formerly identified with straightedge – a clean-living youth-oriented scene tightly bound with hardcore music that is centered on abstinence from intoxicants – about their experiences transitioning through associated music assembly rituals. While features of hardcore music assemblies – e.g. moshing, slamdancing, sing-a-longs – have long been treated as symbolic connections that potentially conjure the religious as conceptualized in Émile Durkheim's “effervescence” and the liminality of Victor Turner's “communitas,” data on transitions from these features of ritual remain scant. Ex-straightedgers generally believed the sorts of deep connections they professed to experience in hardcore rituals as youths were not necessarily currently accessible to them, nor were they replicable elsewhere. Findings then ultimately suggest some post-traditional religious experiences might now be profitably considered in terms of the life course, which has itself transformed alongside the proliferation of newer late/post-modern affiliations and communities.