The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Violent Extremism
Edited with Milan Obaidi, this handbook gathers the psychology of violent extremism into one reference: twenty-four chapters moving from concepts through individual and group processes to macro-level forces, each closing with implications for practitioners and policymakers.
The paper, in plain language
Why a handbook, why now
Research on violent extremism has exploded across disciplines, frameworks and levels of analysis — and fragmented accordingly. Milan Obaidi and I set out to consolidate it: a single reference covering the field's major psychological frameworks, from significance quest and identity fusion to social dominance, relative deprivation and dehumanization, written by roughly fifty contributors including many of the scholars who built those frameworks.
How the book is organized
After the conceptual groundwork — including a machine-learning analysis of more than 34,000 articles charting where the field has been and where it should go — the chapters climb through levels of analysis. Individual-level chapters cover personality, mental disorders, gender, religious fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, morality and emotion. Group-level chapters treat social identity and uncertainty, identity fusion, devoted actors, and threat perception. Macro-level chapters take on inequality, foreign military intervention, globalization and climate. Every chapter ends the same way: what this means for practitioners and policymakers.
Why it matters
The handbook is dedicated to the victims of violent extremism, and that dedication states its purpose: understanding radicalization at every level — from an individual's grievances to a society's fractures — is prevention's raw material. It anchors the extremism strand of my research and the agenda I pursue with colleagues at the Center for Research on Extremism and beyond, where several of the empirical papers summarized on this site fill in the details the handbook maps.
Obaidi, M. & Kunst, J. R. (2025, Eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Violent Extremism. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009407892