Reflections on prevention of violent radicalization processes in the school context: An intercultural and critical approach

Abstract

The article discusses the issue of the prevention of violent radicalization processes (Khosrokhavar, 2014) in schools, in the Italian context, focusing on their jihadist-type declination, and it intends to propose an interpretation based on the intercultural approach (Schiavinato & Mantovani 2005; Mantovani, 2008; Schiavinato 2015) to the difference management in public contexts (Rhazzali, 2016). This perspective allows us to move the scientific debate away from the predominantly securitarian and emergency perspective, widely adopted by public policies, that removes from the political agenda the issue of an effective and fair management of cultural and religious plurality in the society and in the public space, by adopting an approach which is defined in the literature as “policed multiculturalism” (Ragazzi, 2015). Moreover, the securitarian discourse is a leading argument of some political parties and, encouraged by the mass media, is still dominant in common sense discourses. The intercultural perspective, on the other hand, proposes a more complex interpretation that includes not only the issue of immigration, but also allows to question the changes affecting society and everyone lives, in relation to the interconnections and exchanges that characterise the current era. It therefore considers personal and individual experience within a web of relationships co-constructed in everyday interactions, that are in turn situated in a wider social and cultural framework, which gives sense and influences them and, at the same time, is signified and influenced by them. The intercultural approach, in this respect, does not renounce taking a position of criticism and questioning of exclusion or inferiorisation dynamics, that operate both on interpersonal level and in everyday relationships, and on the broader level of the social processes that frame them.