The radicalisation myth
Britain’s Lysenkoism?
12 June 2026
Can a government make a scientific falsehood into official truth?
The Soviet Union tried. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, Soviet biology was dominated by Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist whose theories of heredity were embraced by the Communist Party and eventually elevated into state doctrine. Geneticists who challenged him were silenced, dismissed, or worse. Research was reorganised around ideas that had already been rejected by much of the scientific world. For years, Soviet agriculture and biology were forced to operate within an intellectual framework that was increasingly detached from reality.
How radicalisation became official truth
Most people today regard Lysenkoism as a uniquely Soviet pathology. We imagine that such things cannot happen in modern liberal democracies. Scientific theories are tested against evidence; bad theories are discarded; policy adapts accordingly.
Yet there is at least one field in contemporary Britain where this comforting picture looks increasingly doubtful. For more than two decades, British counter-terrorism policy has rested upon a set of assumptions about radicalisation. These assumptions are so familiar that they are often presented as self-evident truths. People are said to move through identifiable stages on a pathway towards violence. Certain beliefs and grievances are thought to function as warning signs. Individuals are believed to become vulnerable to extremism through a combination of social isolation, identity crises, and exposure to radical ideas. Intervention programmes can then identify those at risk and divert them from the presumed pathway before violence occurs.
These claims are not merely academic theories. They have informed government policy, shaped Prevent referrals, influenced policing and education, and helped justify extensive systems of monitoring and intervention. The problem is that many of these assumptions are far more contested than official rhetoric suggests.
A few days ago, I attended a meeting of counter-terrorism experts where a speaker confidently informed the audience that radicalisation “very rarely starts with violence” but is instead driven by a desire for belonging and connection, combined with a “them versus us” ideology that blames others for one’s problems. The statement was presented not as a hypothesis or a contested interpretation but as established fact.
When I challenged him, pointing out that contemporary research identifies multiple pathways into political violence and that grievance and social needs are not necessarily the primary drivers, he appeared unfamiliar with the work of Sophia Moskalenko and Clark McCauley, two of the most influential researchers in the field. Their book Radicalization to Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to Know emphasises precisely the opposite point: there is no single route into terrorism. Different individuals arrive at political violence through different mechanisms, including personal grievance, group grievance, status seeking, revenge, friendship networks, coercion, ideological commitment, and many other factors.
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What struck me was not that the speaker disagreed with Moskalenko. Scholars disagree all the time. What struck me was that he seemed never to have heard of her. Instead of citing evidence or engaging with competing research, he appealed to his “long experience in the field.”
The invisible college of terrorism experts
This exchange illustrates a broader problem. In many areas of public policy, expertise increasingly derives not from engagement with evidence but from membership in a professional network. Authority comes from having attended the right conferences, worked with the right agencies, and accumulated the right credentials. The danger is that such networks can become intellectually self-contained.
Sociologists of science have long studied this phenomenon. Diana Crane described how scientific knowledge is often shaped by “invisible colleges” — informal networks of researchers who communicate regularly, influence one another’s work, and collectively determine which ideas gain prominence. More recently, Caroline Wagner applied the concept to international development networks, while Bruno Latour explored how expert communities enrol particular problems into specific knowledge frameworks.
These insights are highly relevant to terrorism studies. In 2009, David Miller and Tom Mills published an influential analysis arguing that terrorism expertise is produced within a relatively small and tightly interconnected network of academics, practitioners, security officials, journalists, and consultants. They found that media organisations repeatedly rely on the same small pool of experts to interpret acts of political violence, regardless of whether those experts possess the strongest scholarly credentials.
Their argument was not that these individuals are engaged in a conspiracy. Rather, they suggested that terrorism studies functions as an “invisible college” whose members share common assumptions, professional incentives, and institutional affiliations. Many possess close ties to governments, intelligence agencies, military institutions, and the security industry. As a result, particular ways of understanding political violence become dominant, while alternative perspectives struggle to gain a hearing. This matters because intellectual diversity is essential to scientific progress. A field becomes unhealthy when its core assumptions cease to be tested against serious criticism.
The radicalisation paradigm
The dominant radicalisation paradigm exhibits precisely this tendency. Despite decades of research failing to identify a consistent terrorist profile or a universal pathway to violence, policymakers continue to speak as though such pathways are well established. Despite repeated warnings from researchers about the complexity and diversity of radicalisation processes, official discourse often falls back on simplistic narratives about vulnerability, ideology, and behavioural indicators.
The result is a form of epistemic closure. The same experts advise governments, train practitioners, speak at conferences, appear in the media, review one another’s work, and evaluate the effectiveness of the policies they helped design. Critical voices remain present, but they often occupy a marginal position within the broader policy ecosystem.
None of this means that contemporary Britain is equivalent to Stalin’s Soviet Union. No one is being sent to labour camps for criticising radicalisation theory. The comparison would be absurd. The lesson of Lysenkoism lies elsewhere.
Lysenkoism was not simply bad science. It was bad science that became institutionally indispensable. An entire ecosystem of careers, agencies, policies, and professional identities became invested in treating a questionable theory as established truth. Once that happened, the normal mechanisms of scientific self-correction began to break down.
The question we should ask today is whether something similar has occurred within parts of the counter-terrorism establishment.
When a theory becomes embedded in government policy, supported by powerful institutions, taught to practitioners, repeated by the media, and defended by networks of recognised experts, it acquires a remarkable ability to survive contrary evidence. At that point, the issue is no longer whether the theory is correct. The issue is whether the institutions built around it can afford to admit that it might be wrong.
That is the real lesson of Lysenkoism. The danger is not that governments occasionally make mistakes. The danger is that some mistakes become too useful, too profitable, and too deeply embedded in institutional life ever to be recognised as mistakes at all.
