Grievance-fueled violence can be better understood using an enactive approach

Area of Science:

• Philosophy of Mind
• Social Psychology
• Criminology

Background:

• Lone actor grievance-fueled violence presents a significant challenge to understanding and prevention.
• Existing approaches often rely on external factors, overlooking the subjective experience of grievance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose an enactivist philosophical approach to understanding the pathway from grievance to lone actor extreme violence.
• To reframe grievance not as a static attribute but as a dynamic, sense-making process.

Main Methods:

• Adopting an enactivist philosophical framework.
• Analyzing grievance as an unfolding, interpersonal, and context-sensitive construct.
• Examining sense-making and self-regulation in interaction with the social environment.

Main Results:

• Enactivism offers a dynamic, first-person perspective on how individuals develop grievances.
• Grievance is understood as an active process of making sense of the world, potentially leading to violent extremism.
• Risk factors are viewed as external indicators of internal sense-making and self-regulation processes.

Conclusions:

• The enactivist approach provides a complementary framework for understanding the dynamics of grievance in violent extremism.
• It highlights the non-linear, principle-based unpredictability of pathways to lone actor violence.
• This framework can inform prevention strategies, research, and mitigate stigma and confirmation bias.