Switching Sides: Exploring Violent Extremist Intergroup Migration Across Hostile Ideologies

Abstract

Violent extremists and terrorists often abandon their associates to join like-minded groups (i.e., with the same ideology or cause) or leave violent activism altogether (i.e., disengage or deradicalize). Sometimes, however, militants might switch between groups with mutually exclusive and hostile ideologies (e.g., from left-wing to right-wing extremism or from right-wing extremism to Salafi-jihadism). To explain intergroup migration, social identity theory (SIT) stipulates individual mobility as a strategy for status enhancement. However, SIT's applicability to this highly specific scenario of intergroup migration across hostile ideologies has not previously been explored. Several theoretical caveats could limit SIT's explanatory value here, such as potential group impermeability, lack of realistic status enhancement, and high social identity salience with the original ingroup. To assess SIT's applicability, this article uses four well-documented individual case studies of violent extremist intergroup migration across hostile ideologies in Germany. The article shows that SIT's individual mobility strategy largely applies to this scenario, at least in the presented case studies.