violence
Definition
Violence refers to physical harm directed at others that may function as an end in itself rather than as a means to a political, religious, or racial goal. Some individuals, termed 'violence fixated individuals' or 'value extremists,' regard violence as intrinsically good, as illustrated by the case of Axel Rudakubana, whose statements after the 2024 Southport attack expressed approval of the killings rather than any ideological justification. A separate but related pattern involves perpetrators who select ideological content primarily to legitimize or rationalize acts of violence to which they were already drawn, rather than being driven by genuine ideological commitment. The distinction matters for classification: where ideology functions only as post-hoc justification, the violence itself becomes the primary explanatory variable, and taxonomies built around ideological content fail to account for it.
Sources: Cassam (2026), Horgan & Shayler (2026)
Applications
Violence and Ideology
The relationship between violence and ideology in extremist behavior is not fixed. Some perpetrators treat ideological content as a resource for rationalizing violence rather than as a motivating cause, and in the most extreme cases ideology is absent altogether, with the individual fixated on violence for its own sake. Some observers have noted that what certain actors are really about is the violence, with ideology serving a secondary, legitimizing function.
Sources: Cassam (2026), Horgan & Shayler (2026)
Violence and Radicalization
Radicalization research has traditionally assumed an ideological core, but rising case counts of young people radicalized without formal ties to designated extremist organizations complicate that assumption. This pattern is consistent with accounts of individuals whose primary orientation is toward violence rather than toward any particular belief system.
Sources: Horgan & Shayler (2026), Cassam (2026)
Violence and Extremism
Extremism has conventionally been defined by reference to ideological content, but this framing excludes individuals whose extreme position concerns the value of violence itself. A commitment to violence as intrinsically good satisfies criteria for extremism, in the sense of occupying a position near the tail of a normal distribution of evaluative stances, without meeting the conditions of generality, interconnectedness, and explanatory ambition required for a belief system to count as an ideology. This gap in existing taxonomies means that non-ideological violent extremists remain poorly accounted for in both research and practitioner frameworks.
Sources: Cassam (2026), Horgan & Shayler (2026)
