VORTEX · Coping with Varieties of Radicalization into Terrorism and Extremism

VORTEX (Coping with Varieties of Radicalisation into Terrorism and Extremism) represents an innovative and integrative doctoral network of practitioners and academics for training of doctoral candidates in radicalization studies. The understanding of radicalization is currently trapped between securitisational approaches and socio-cultural contextual explanations, influencing political agencies, practitioners, and scholars alike. One approach focuses on immediate and short-term security needs of European societies. Another approach stresses long-term structural factors, such as socio-economic marginalization, as a breeding ground for extremism, radicalization, and extremist world views and cognitive mindsets. This DN aims not only to identify a theoretical a methodological gap between the two approaches, but also to develop new evidence-based innovative strategies to countering and preventing ideological and behavioural radicalization. VORTEX will provide an integrated and thus meaningful research programme not only but primarily for doctoral candidates to pursue their research in a fruitful and meaningful dialogue among relevant disciplines and in a dense web of supervision, training and interaction to jump start both successful and relevant careers. Bringing together a network of academic and non-academic participating organizations from 14 countries on three continents, dealing with both religious and secular radicalisation, this DN will explore and compare different varieties of radicalization in several empirical settings. Practice-based research with associated partners, connecting doctoral candidates to future job markets and audiences, will offer the opportunity to investigate radicalisations on several levels, ranging from local to global and from cognitive to behavioural. We propose an advanced learning program, combining theoretical and instrumental knowledge at transnational and interdisciplinary levels.