International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 131

International Journal on Criminology
pupils celebrating the end of their written baccalaureat exams by young people
from “difficult” neighborhoods. Second, we have also seen that a certain type of
teaching can exacerbate these identity crises by stoking inaccurate analyses of the
situation in the Middle East, and the glorified one-dimensional nature of North
African identity (overlooking the fact that Andalusia, although glorified, was
fiercely colonized). Meanwhile, a number of studies observe that the prerequisites
for access to employment are based less on education than behavior—even simply
turning up on time and having an appropriate attitude to various requests. When
these two elements are combined, the crisis of affiliative identity overdetermines
status affiliation, and for some can even reach a boiling point, particularly if fueled
by national and foreign events.
Thus, the automatic link between lack of integration and violence cannot
be considered pertinent. We observe for example that gang leaders, and above all
those leading attacks, are well-integrated and educated. However, they prefer rupture
due to a political desire to stand out from their peers in order to reinforce their
feeling of belonging founded on this imaginary basis, which consists of various
challenges to overcome.
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III
The Specificity of Political Motivation and its
Impact on Economic Development
Let us now turn to that other, more lethal form of violence represented by
so-called “terrorist” attacks, which are also generally characterized as “social
violence” and not, in the first instance, as political violence. What is the
primary argument for “submerging” them in the vague concept of the “social”?
Primarily, foregrounding the breakdown of traditional ways of life suggests that
it is supposedly they that have in a way produced such radicalization. Historically,
however, the permanent struggle between new and old traditions has always
defined not only social relations to production but also political relations representing
both the status linked to the social division of labor and also the symbolic
forms of belonging that structure the relation to the world (via the imaginary, theological,
or political order). This struggle (in the Greek sense of polemos) has always
been the driver of history if we complete the Marxist formulation by considering
it in its ontological permanency, rather than merely historicizing it by the weight
of private property, which is in fact merely one of the aspects of this conflictual
factor that can be perpetually identified, including as far as back as the reaches of
human prehistory.
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