[By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]

The first half of 2015 has seen a rising global awareness of the serious threat of radicalism. Shortly after New Year's Day, the world was shocked by the shootings at Charlie Hebdo. On February 17, the White House called a summit on countering violent extremism, signifying the United States' efforts to coordinate a global fight against home-grown extremism.

Nongovernmental global institutions also seemed to be willing to invest resources in discussions of this topic. The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung organized the EU-Asia Security Cooperation on Counter-terrorism Seminar on March 5 and 6 in Singapore. Scores of European and Asian scholars participated in the discussion. The Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, together with Turkey's Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies, adopted "the lessons of countering radicalism" as one of the topics at its annual summit in Antalya on March 24 and 25, which was attended by twenty to thirty scholars.

I happened to be invited to both seminars, and learned a lot from both of them. I quite agree with the point of view that radicalism is deeply rooted in social grievances and in discriminatory religious policy in some cases, and I agree that its spread can be attributed to poor monitoring of the internet and insufficient international coordination and cooperation.

The world – the West in particular – used to regard the religious tenets of Islam as the root cause of radicalism. When compared to this old paradigm, the search for the social roots of radicalism seems to be much more equitable.

However, despite my agreement with the above-mentioned points, I disagree with approaches to the study of global radicalization. By attributing radicalism to social grievances, one implicitly presumes that radicalization happens everywhere in the world and is finally and unfortunately embodied in phenomena such as the growth of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or Boko Haram. For instance, the Singapore seminar particularly discussed how to prevent young Asian and European radicals from joining ISIS.

It is certainly true that radicalization as a result of social grievances does exist in every part of the world and even in every period in human history. But why and how has radicalization just happened to proliferate in the Middle East instead of in other regions during these first 15 years of the new century? This cannot be explained simply through the above-mentioned approach.