YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

Youth political participation, social engagement, and extremism  189 overlooked two other “affair” from 1989. The headscarf affair in France and the affair related to the publication of Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses, which lasteduntil 11 September 2001, remained somewhat overshadowed–at least seemingly – by the triumphant march of freemarket ideology. Last but not least, various global crises – time and time again – have served as an excuse to shrink civic space. For example, the “security cri- sis” that followed the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in New York, and the related “war on terror,” allowed the U.S. government to enact leg- islation, the so-called Patriot Act, which, in the name of security and na- tional interest, allows for violations of fundamental rights and freedoms. Despite the fact that 11 September 2001 became a kind of beginning of the “counting” of the calendrical era of the war on terror, it marks a security paradigm in which the debate on radicalisation and violent extremism is trapped, a series of missed meetings and missed opportunities. Last but not least, this is confirmed by individual slogans (“for one a terrorist, for another a freedom fighter”), metaphors (the battle for “hearts and souls”), and other clichés (e.g. “what happens before the bomb”): rhetorical “arse- nal” The “intelligence-security” industry is hit by the problem, but the very essence is actually overlooked (Lockley-Scott, 2019). “Terror,” as U.S. President John F. Kennedy emphasized in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 25, 1961, “is not a new weapon. Throughout history it has been used by those who could not prevail, either by persuasion or by example.” Radicalisation and violent extremism are therefore anything but a secu- rity phenomenon. How else to understand a series of “collateral” prob- lems that the security paradigm and the associated standard notion of radicalisation and violent extremism largely bypass, e.g. moral panic, populism, conflict diversity, intolerance, xenophobia, cultural distance, the integration gap, etc.? Their perception opens up at least two sets of negative consequences exclusively through the security perspective. On one hand, this includes the social marginalization or exclusion of those who have been exposed to extremist ideas and general discomfort. On