Critical Thinking Framework

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At its epistemic root, the conversation on how to effectively combat radical messaging is a question of how to combat extremism and radicalization. Advocates of strategic communication and censorship strategies implicitly attribute linear causality to the concept of extremism. In this framework, extremism is an outcome resulting from discrete stimuli of certain understandable and identifiable factors. Simply stated, extremism is viewed as a causal relationship whereby factors such as internet access to radical propaganda result in radicalization. This framework implies that radicalization is predictable and that certain factors when observed result in radicalization. While this is a compelling formulation it obscures the social dimensions …show more content…

These ‘indirect relationships’ are not limited to direct communicative interaction and rather encapsulate any and all accesses through which people are able to feel a relational tie with the someone else. To concretize this concept, we can imagine someone who views the speeches, literature, and media of an admired terrorist leader and through this establishes an ‘imagined’ indirect tie with that leader on the basis of similar political and ideological identification. The word ‘imagined’ is operative in this formulation because it speaks to a politics of identification. As individuals form ties both direct and indirect which inform their understanding of themselves, those with similarly shared relations and personal narratives will imagine that they are members of a community. These community relations are imperative as they contextualize individual narrative and sense of identity within a broader communal narrative. These imagined communities not only inform how people view themselves, but also what they imagine their role in the world to be. In this theoretical framework we understand radicalization and extremism, as the network of relations that someone has which informs their sense of self (personal narrative) such that they imagine themselves to be a member of a community all of whom share similar objectives and social …show more content…

Social relations theory has provided an abundance of empirical evidence to illustrate that people understand new information within a relational and communal context. New information is not objectively learned, rather it is filtered and appropriated through the prism of an individual’s personal narrative and is marshalled pursuant to what they imagine their role in the world is (communal narrative). All information that a person receives is filtered so as to comport with the personal and communal narratives in which the individual is situated. Below I shall more clearly enumerate the policy implications of this social relations model of

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