Tackling Terrorism’s Taboo: Shame

This exploratory article provides a conceptual framework for explaining how shame is used by terrorist organizationsin their recruitment and radicalization strategies. Shame is a universal emotion, experienced across all cultures,and as such presents scholars with a platform for easy cross-cultural comparisons of radicalization phenomena.Terrorist use of entitative identities to divide society into adherents and apostates, particularly in the study ofreligious extremists like jihadist entities, provides a verdant ground of understanding how organizations movepeople into higher states of radicalization, and potentially enticing them to engage in terrorism. However, as anaversive emotion, shame’s taboo status has, it is suggested here, led scholars to overlook its role in past studiesof radicalization. This article postulates that emotions and identity are an integral aspect of the social self, andbecause of shame’s regulatory power over social identity and norm adherence, it should be at the core of the studyof radicalization processes.