Author: Anton Friedrich Fischer
Recall the young man from my previous essay: He is hunched over on his couch in his small apartment on the outskirts of Berlin, the only light coming from the blue flicker of his smartphone. He scrolls through TikTok with a restless thumb, adrift in a diffuse sense of directionlessness. Then, one short TikTok suddenly makes him pause. The video claims that migrants are destroying his country and that corrupt elites have betrayed “people like him” with their mass migration plans. For a moment, his aimless frustration sharpens into focused anger. He no longer feels adrift but empowered. Eventually, he scrolls on. Yet, over the following days, similar videos accumulate in his TikTok feed, nudging him, almost imperceptibly, toward a far-right digital echo chamber.
His initial reaction is rooted in a bitter paradox: Western democracy assures him that he is free to choose who he wants to become. Yet this promise quietly assumes capacities he does not possess: the psychological resilience to plan, the social guidance to navigate these possibilities, and the economic security required to take the necessary risks. Thus, his stagnation remains an unprocessed and diffuse sense of personal failure. Over time, this drift strips away his sense of significance and orientation. Without a place to belong, he experiences a crisis of meaning and this burden curdles into vague grievances toward society at large.
In this void, extremist videos in his TikTok feed offer an intoxicating and cheap way to restore an apparently meaningful life. The message moralizes his frustrations by externalizing them onto constructed enemies, the pluralistic state and migrants, converting personal powerlessness into energizing anger. By adopting the role of “defender of the nation”, the young man reframes his personal disappointments as a collective betrayal by elites. Together, this ready-made narrative supplies significance, orientation, and belonging in a single ideological package that subjectively restores a sense of meaning, thereby turning existential drift into a dangerous trajectory of radicalization. Now, let us shift the scene.
Four thousand miles away, in the dusty border town of Dori in the Sahel region of Burkina Faso, another young man stands waiting. He is sweating in a long line at a police checkpoint, trying to reach the market to find work. In his pocket is a university degree that has been rolled up and unfolding for five years without ever earning him a paycheck. Unlike the young man in Berlin, neither his aspirations nor his frustrations are vague. He knows exactly who he wants to be: a husband, a father, and a provider. What he lacks is not meaning, but access.
As a convoy of government SUVs bypasses the line, kicking dust into the faces of those waiting, a soldier shoves him back with his rifle. The message is clear: social mobility is reserved for others. Later that day, a recruiter from JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin), a local militant group, approaches him. He does not offer a dreamy narrative of a “pure” past or a heroic civilizational struggle. Instead, his message is as brutal as pragmatic. He points to the disappearing convoy, offers a rifle, a salary, and a promise: “We will force the road open for us.”
While the young man in Berlin undergoes a process of radicalization, the young man in Dori is experiencing a process of violent mobilization. Both are stuck, both lack social mobility. Yet the mechanisms that convert stagnation into violence are fundamentally different. In the West, “radicalization” is used as a normative term describing a departure from an established democratic order. In the Sahel, however, the term “radicalization” is generally avoided, while “violent mobilization” is more precise. Following Tilly (2003), it captures violence as a form of political mobilization rather than ideological deviation, capturing a response to an extreme environment in which the state itself has broken the social contract, leaving no stable political order from which to radicalize away.
Back to the individualized West: The young man first asks, “What is wrong with me?”, bearing his burden of failure alone. The extremist narrative then supplies an external target for his discomfort, transforming internalized failure into righteous anger. He is not drawn to the extremist movement for employment, but for meaning and symbolic status denied to him by the marketplace. In a “quest for significance”(Kruglanski et al., 2022), the far-right narrative allows him to shift his self-perception from that of a “loser” to a heroic, and ultimately violent, warrior for his nation.
The young man in Dori, by contrast, knows exactly what is wrong, and it is not his fault. Rather than carrying a private burden of failure, he identified his enemies before any recruitment: the soldier, the checkpoint, and a destructive state. He is trapped in what scholars of the region call “waithood”, that is, a state of enforced social limbo in which young people are structurally denied the milestones of adulthood, such as marriage and independence, by economic collapse and corrupt rule (Honwana, 2012). For him, the extremist group is not a vehicle for existential meaning, but an instrument. As the United Nations Development Programme has shown, militant organizations in Africa often operate as economic exit strategies, providing the salary needed to marry and the weapon required to compel respect in a world where the state itself is the primary aggressor (UNDP, 2017).
The contrast between Western radicalization and violent mobilization in Africa becomes even starker when examining what finally triggers active engagement in violence. In the West, radicalization is increasingly influenced by a slow, digital drift, an incremental indoctrination by algorithms that normalize grievance and hatred until extremism feels like the only remaining anchor. Nevertheless, this online pull is most often reinforced by offline social ties and local peer groups. In Dori, mobilization is visceral and abrupt. The UNDP study revealed that for seven out of ten recruits to violent extremist groups in Africa, the decisive trigger was a specific government action: the arrest, abuse, or killing of a family member by state security forces. The young man at the checkpoint joins JNIM not because ideology has captured his imagination, but because the state has foreclosed his future.
Ultimately, both men, like all of us, seek a life of significance. Yet the remedies extremism offers are fundamentally different. In the West, the main challenge is to rebuild social and psychological scaffolding for those left isolated by individualization, preventing personal failure from turning into collective hate. This is not to deny that material and opportunity inequalities exist in the West, but interventions that rebuild belonging, guidance, and psychological resilience are often more effective for deradicalization than economic assistance there. In the Sahel, however, a meaningful life path is simply inseparable from material conditions. Thus, solutions in this region must focus first and foremost on structural and political reforms, aimed at breaking the limbo of waithood. The UNDP study shows that, across sub-Saharan Africa, employment is the most frequently cited need at the point of joining a terror group, and that government action is often the decisive tipping point for recruitment. To put it simply, one man needs primarily a lifeline that reconnects him to democratic society. The other needs a state that stops standing between him and the life he is already trying to build.
References
Kruglanski, A. W., Molinario, E., Jasko, K., Webber, D., Leander, N. P., & Pierro, A. (2022). Significance-quest theory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(4), 1050-1071.
Honwana, A. (2012). The Time of Youth: Work, Social Change, and Politics in Africa.
Kumarian Press Book.
Tilly, C. (2003). The Politics of Collective Violence. Cambridge University Press.
United Nations Development Programme. (2017). Journey to Extremism in Africa: Recruitment and Drivers of Violent Extremism.