Ayhan Kaya's lecture at the Extreme Beliefs project event

On October 19, 2022, the PRIME Youth project’s Principal Investigator, Professor Ayhan Kaya, made a presentation entitled “Islamist and Nativist Radicalizations in Europe” at the event organized by the Extreme Beliefs Project.

Ayhan Kaya’s talk was based on his elaboration on the reactionary radicalization processes of self‐identified Muslim and native youth residing in Europe. The PRIME Youth research team, including postdoctoral researchers Ayşenur Benevento and Metin Koca, participated in the discussion following the lecture.

In his fifty-minute-long lecture, Kaya questioned the PRIME Youth project’s beginning, evolution, methodology, and main findings. Based on in‐depth interviews conducted with self‐identified Muslim and native youth in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, Kaya argued that the two groups' radicalization cannot be explained by their civilizational, cultural, and religious differences. Instead, the drivers of their radicalization are “very identical” as they are socio‐economically, politically, and psychologically deprived of certain elements constrained by the flows of globalization and dominant forms of neo‐liberal governance. According to Kaya, these groups are co‐radicalizing each other in the contemporary world that is defined by the ascendance of civilizational political discourse.

A lively Q&A session followed Kaya’s lecture. The session included a discussion of the project sampling, the ideological discourses that may lead to radicalization(s), and the role of Christianity in the right-wing movements in Europe.

Reported by Metin Koca, ERC PRIME Youth Project Post-Doc Researcher, European Institute, Istanbul Bilgi University