Despite September 11, 2001 becoming “Year One” of the “War on Terror” calendar era, the socalled security paradigm trapping the debate on radicalization and violent extremism is marked by a series of failed encounters and missed opportunities. This has been confirmed by a number of slogans, metaphors and other clichés that use “conventional wisdom” to hit the target, but somehow still miss the point. Radicalization and violent extremism are not exclusively a security phenomenon and therefore do not (exclusively) belong to the domain of the security and intelligence industry. At the same time, the discussion of the phenomenon of radicalization and violent extremism is also marked by a high degree of conceptual confusion over some of the fundamental concepts that are part of its gravitational orbit. This article raises some of the fundamental questions (and a series of adjacent problems) concerning the very notion of violent extremism, which remain largely overlooked in the scholarly discussions. A special emphasis is placed on the analysis of the conceptual and moral dimension of violent extremism (what violent extremism actually is and why it is problematic) and on the analysis of the relationship between the two basic concepts of this phrase, i.e. the concepts of violence and extremism.
