Mapping Local Moral Worlds of ‘Extremism'

Drawing empirically on the cases of recent anti-Muslim activism in England and Wales and dissident republicanism in Ireland and Northern Ireland, in this paper we advance a new theoretical perspective through which to describe radical social and political movement organisations and to analyse their internal dynamics and their interactions with wider social and political currents. The emergence of new radical groups almost invariably provokes an often hard-fought struggle between an assortment of activists, academics and policymakers over the particular configuration of nouns and adjectives that ‘best’ correspond to the group in question. Yet part of the reason such categorical struggles are often so hard-fought is that the very act of categorising such groups is itself fraught with ontological challenges – the descriptors used are often unstable and contested; there is usually considerable ideological and tactical variance within the nominal group; and, in practice, it is often difficult to identify where one group ends and another cognate group begins. In this paper we propose that such ontological problems can be circumvented by adopting an alternative approach to describing radical activism, based not on attempting to describe the group per se, but on delineating the emergent social rules enacted in the patchwork of intersubjective contexts of belief and behaviour in which activists operate – what, drawing on Arthur Kleinman’s work, we refer to as the ‘local moral worlds’ associated with these particular activist scenes.