Extremists: Criminals and Victims of Radical Violence

Abstract

The radical political violence outgoing from extremist communities became the most dangerous trend in the modern criminal dynamics. The victims of crimes committed by suicide terrorists are not only those who are subject to political and ideological violence, but also absolutely random people outside the field of politics. The actual perpetrators of mass homicide, including the most brutal acts of terrorism, are extremists with homicide-suicidal syndrome, interested in the society’s attention to them, convinced, in an irrational way, that absolutely all people are guilty of their problems. The fate of extremists and victims of their radical violence is not always directly determined by the level of unemployment or organized relations between the rule of law state and other social management institutions. These well-known criminological determinants affect the form of extremist actions and crimes, they may lower the level of extremist aggression, but do not change the motives of criminals. The higher the quality of life in the country, the less frequently mass homicide will happen, but it is likely to use high tech. Limiting the use of firearms by extremists, we are confronted with their attempts to adapt vehicles for deadly purposes. The actions of extremists do not reflect any real political struggle for freedom and independence, for religious values, for social justice; in practice, there is irrational extremism — a new socio-political phenomenon of active criminal protest against the very idea of huma­nism. Violent extremism emerges against the background of a certain social situation: 1) low efficiency of social policy; 2) isolation of an individual from civil society institutions and state structures; 3) desperate human desire for self-realization that is set against universal indifference to the problems of an individual. Under the influence of criminogenic factors, an extremist’s personality may become the object of manipulation by terrorist groups and other criminal communities.