Reframing Radicalisation: A Relational Sociology of Qanon

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 6. Far-Right Movements & Extremist Discourse

Abstract

Radicalisation is typically treated as a transformation within individuals. Research asks how people adopt extreme beliefs, how those beliefs escalate, and how they might be interrupted. Even when relational language appears, relationships tend to function as background influences, recruitment pathways, or sites of collateral damage. The analytic unit remains the radicalised subject.
This paper argues that this framing misidentifies the scale at which radicalisation operates. Radicalisation does not simply occur inside individuals and later disrupt their social worlds. It unfolds within relational fields composed of trust, recognition, authority, and belonging. Belief acquires force through networks that affirm it, while other ties are strained, recalibrated, or abandoned. The reorganisation of relational life is not a consequence of radicalisation. It is part of the process itself.
Drawing on qualitative research conducted for The Hidden Pandemic (Mulcahy and Simpson, in press), based on thousands of first hand accounts from the Reddit community r QAnonCasualties, this paper develops the concept of relational radicalisation. Analysing the experiences of Social Network Clusters who live alongside QAnon belief, we show how authority migrates from intimate bonds to mediated communities, how shared reality erodes within households, and how care and emotional labour are redistributed, often unevenly and along gendered lines. Crucially, the responses of those embedded within these ties do not occur after radicalisation consolidates. They shape its trajectory.
Reframing radicalisation as relationally constituted, relationally consequential, and relationally responded to shifts the definition of the problem. It moves analysis beyond extremist minds and toward the organisation of social life. A relational sociology makes visible the infrastructures that sustain belief and therefore expands the horizon of explanation and response.

Authors

• Rian Enid Mulcahy, University of Greenwich

• Jessica Simpson, University of Greenwich