Across contemporary democracies, there is growing concern that some citizens increasingly view violence as a legitimate means to pursue political, ideological, or religious goals. Such attitudes threatens not only personal safety but also the very conditions that make democratic life possible: civil liberties, pluralism, and non-violent conflict resolution.There is a growing need for person-centered, pattern-based approaches that treat individuals’ lived experiences as configurations rather than as independent predictors. Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) heatmaps provide one promising tool for this purpose. These heatmaps allow researchers to visualize, for each individual, how experiences of violence and insecurity, feelings of belonging and trust, democratic orientations, religiosity, life satisfaction, and political activism co-occur – and how these multidimensional profiles relate to support for political violence. Such visual, exploratory methods are particularly well suited to complex phenomena like radicalization, where different constellations of similar ingredients may lead to different outcomes. In this paper, we draw on large-scale survey data from seven Western democracies to investigate how risk and protective factors related to belonging, democracy, and education cluster together at the individual level, and how these clusters are associated with the justification of terrorism as a political means. By employing Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) heatmaps as a complementary method to traditional statistical analyses, we aim to illuminate distinct pathways toward higher or lower propensity for political violence, and to highlight the role of social belonging and democratic norms as potential protective factors with direct implications for educational practice and policy.

The ideological underpinnings of the Great Replacement Theory, which frames Muslims as a threat to Europe, originated in Serbia and emboldened a wider narrative of anti-Muslim hate across Western milieus. The othering of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), an autochthonous ethnic group in Southeastern Europe, has contributed to the normalization of the alienation of Muslims throughout Europe, engendering Educational Displacement—an internalized sense of invisibility and devaluation within targeted individuals, diminishing their participation and trust in the societal institutions. In this complex socio-political and historical context, Bosniaks have nonetheless chosen to principally champion interfaith coexistence, offering an instructive and community-based model of resilience to hate and violence. The study investigates the Bosniaks’ affinity for coexistence by examining the underexplored case of interfaith solidarity and entente between Muslims and Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1540 to the present.

In recent years, Western societies have witnessed a notable rise in populism, nationalism, and extremist ideologies, marked by the increasing dehumanization of specific social groups. This trend presents significant challenges to the preservation of civil liberties, particularly the freedom of action and speech for targeted groups, both within higher education institutions and K-12 schools. The study investigates whether access to such freedoms impacts students’ sense of belonging in school and society. Reduced belonging among certain groups diminishes social cohesion and heightens the risk of radicalization and targeted violence. Drawing from a comprehensive sample of N = 518,833 students from 18,819 schools in 68 countries or economies as defined by the OECD, this study reveals a significant insight: countries with more equitable access to civil liberties across all social groups exhibit the higher average levels of school belonging.

Abstract This study presents findings on the indicators of educational displacement as an early risk factor for radicalization in school settings in the U.S. We collected and analyzed data from 301 students living in 43 U.S. states to inform the creation of Reimagine Resilience, an innovative violence prevention training program for educators and educational staff developed at Teachers College, Columbia University, and to measure early indications of educational displacement as a risk factor for radicalization. The study shows that poor teacher-student relations and multiple experiences of biased speech and behavior are significant early predictors of the students’ educational displacement. Educational displacement, in this study, is measured as a lack of social belonging in schools.