Countering extremism
Acute grievances result in affective, cognitive, behavioural radicality. Radicalisation is a collective phenomenon. Radicals are ordinary people who succumb to social issues often embedded in biographical, historical, geopolitical injustices. Activists can be radical in their social stances; however never spiral into violent participation to address issues they see in front of them. Counter-extremism discusses hate speech, violence, and overall dehumanising and criminal approaches to address of the grievances.
Radicalisation is diverse and becomes part of lives of ordinary people. Program engages in formation of knowledge, beliefs, motives and habits for socially active, lawful behaviour. Extremism is embedded in hate speech, violence, dehumanisation, and criminality while interpersonal and intergroup thinking showcases that another is possible, can be comprehended and consciously accepted.
Commonly it is the acute grievances that lead people to radicalisation and extremism. Coinciding of particular ideological ideas with particular lived experiences and group dynamics turn people into supporters of ideological cause.
It is worth noting that acute grievances can be structured and as the program partakes in the promotion of structural understanding to comprehension of radicalisation and extremism experience, it is designed to enable further self-organisation skills to bettering of own life participation and position. Quite often adults and young people comply with the legal requirements not due to their understanding and rooted conviction in that laws represent their interests, but due to the customary obedience to the laws. However, on a deeper substantial level, most cases that inform the moral consciousness of society find expression in legal consciousness, supported and protected by law.
Diverse encountered situations demand application of individual guiding criteria that would guide their choice of action. Some considerations include: the value of the goal in relation to the acuteness of their need for law; various circumstances of the situation and their significance; effectiveness of lawful action as means to achieve a goal; probability and significance of possible undesirable consequences. Countering extremism aims to establish a better understanding and awareness of individual’s behaviour with consideration for their current social role and individual’s potential.
In part of social and legal design program discusses social phenomena, social relations, social institutions, and social space based on common goals and values, on the basis of common significant lifecreativity.
Furthermore, the program gives attention to vocational guidance and provides opportunities for people falling through the social gaps. Aware and sustainable professional identification is based on the acceptance of responsibility and encompasses consideration for personally acceptable professional traditions, values and meanings of creative activity, cooperation and participation in collective efforts. Professional activity can present incredible opportunities to realisation of individual’s vision, it is both a form of material wealth and a form of expression. Sustainable professional identification means successful professional situation, successful professional relations through balanced identification with own professional group and distancing from other professional groups, and positive image of own professional self.
Reaffirming program’s enablement of structural understanding, it is important to clarify that recognition of structure and its components enables to make independent decisions. In fact, those who do not actively practice their decision making should inquire of their ability to fully regulate their actions under conditions of psychological pressure. People are susceptible to subjective experiences, to their sphere of confluence of motivations and needs, and to the extent of development of their ability for self-determination and self-regulation of own behaviour.
Most commonly, distorted understanding of legal principles comes into conflict with normative principles of legal consciousness. Perceived normalisation of redistribution of public material resources in the interests of certain social groups; permissiveness as opposed to freedom of choice and social equality; impunity and forgiveness in opposition to the principle of humanism. A negative legal attitude becomes entrenched in the idea of the end as a justification for the means and concludes in the moral and psychological position to decision making based on the idea that all means are valid for achievement of own interests.
Extremism is noted to in part originate out of the negative influence on the legal consciousness. Extremist organisations are observed to partake in patterns of illegal behaviour and often recognise such behaviour as means of self-affirmation and material support. Radicalisation and extremism become a transformative force.
Further political views provide grounds for contestation of the political building blocks, such as notions of ‘freedom’, ‘community’, ‘place’, ‘justice’, and ‘choice’. Notably these words can have radically different meanings. Individuals and groups of people, whole nations are known to engage in overt acts of aggression to attest for their interpretation of freedom in contestation to the interpretations of others. Freedom is best described as organised, only through organisation, through its curatorship can coherency and representation be achieved, guided, and navigated. Nonetheless, the world does not operate solely on social gravity – throw a frying pan and it would most definitely land – however social gravity is a huge part of human experience.
Development of abilities for successful implementation of set goals, self-sufficient integration into the social organism, and self-realisation are the main goals of adaptation and resocialisation. Initially family as a biological, economic, sociocultural system is a source and link in the transmission of social experiences to a child. Family has a special place in the social microenvironment and it has significant influence on the development of the legal consciousness of an individual. However, the family either due some of its characteristics or due to its absence does not always accompany transformation is a positive direction.
Countering extremism opens a discussion of individual’s goals and plans, the role of friends and other significant people, function and processes of self-organisation, formal education, self-education, and career growth while providing social environment to support individual’s self-esteem. Holistic approaches are aimed to address the issue of successful interaction with the social environment.
Enrichment of understanding of social and legal experience enables active use of the potential capabilities of society through communication with the social environment. Legal education contributes to prevention of negative influence of factors in social environment to enable sustainable participation and successful lifecreativity.
The discussed professional identity as means of participation and similarly means of future orientation is an effective way of social and economic participation enabling to creation of impact and contribution to valuable positions and causes. Freedom and responsibility can be considered as the foundations of the psychological characteristics of being enabling their practice through professional activities within successful professional construct mentioned earlier.
Moreover, responsibility means the ability of expression. This is the readiness to act independently, exercise freedom of choice and make deliberate decisions aimed at actively transforming the world around. In addition, to enable to develop the moral qualities and to be responsible for the consequences of own actions before the society and before own conscience.
A solid foundation for the concept of professional identity is derived from tasks and goals, process, and competence and continues in the sense, interaction, and form. Self-determination is affected by the intersection of professional, personal, and social aspects. In part of the Countering extremism program, this theoretical comprehension is supported by the interactive component whereby participants are invited to partake in an exercise to consider own professional life plan.
Professional self-determination entails the design and development of a work and life path in general. Initial subjective image of the profession coincides with the self-image and attitudes that inform interpretation of self, thus individual gains an overlapped vision embedded in the image of subjective-subject and subjective-object relations that concludes in professional self-awareness. Professional identity is the comprehension of completed development. Attention to aesthetic consciousness is an integral part of interaction with the legal consciousness. Exploration of basis through such categories as of beauty and ugliness, sublime and lowly, tragic and comic enables aesthetic consciousness that reflects and enables further familiarisation with the object of legal phenomena in the life of society and legal behaviour.
While unlike legal, religious or moral consciousness, art does not contain clear and imperative commands and requirements for human action, art does describe the phenomena of social life in the form of artistic images, art offers a certain model of behaviour and contains in its works social requirements for the individual. Overall, leading to conclude with the aesthetics of life and the structure of legal consciousness based on the principle of competent and successful unity of consciousness and activity.