The World Today

February & March 2017: Inside the mind of the extremist

Sarah Marks and Daniel Pick explore the difficulty in pinpointing how radicalization works in practice

The Cambridge history professor looks at the future of British identity in the light of Brexit and the power of the Magna Carta myth

Olivier Roy on Europe’s failure to understand the roots of radicalization

In Myanmar, Buddhist monks whose central tenet is non-violence, have been widely criticized for inciting violence against Muslims

Oliver McTernan on the challenge of religiously inspired violence

Security camera footage shows three missing British girls in Istanbul before they boarded a bus to the Turkish-Syrian border to join Daesh

Sumayah Fatani examines Islamic State’s recruiting strategies for women

A woman stands amid the wreckage of war in the embattled district of Bakr, in southeast Mosul

Wadah Khanfar analyses the power plays that have torn the region apart

How do young people get ‘radicalized’ and transform into terrorists? This has perplexed governments for the past decade and, despite the investment of huge sums, it is still not possible to draw up a reliable profile of a budding terrorist.

Articles

Journalists watch Tony Blair's televised statement after the London 7/7 bombings

Christopher Stewart on the killers who use the media as a weapon

A nickel mine near Voh on the island of New Caledonia

Alex Vines on the island’s referendum to break free from France

Prospective adoptive parents in the United States have been turning to Africa in recent years

Peter Selman on how adoption across borders is in decline

Attempts to stem flow of Syrians are counterproductive, says Haid Haid

Succession of Zhou Xiaochuan as governor of the People’s Bank of China will prove decisive in determining the renminbi’s future

Geoffrey Yu discusses an expert’s view on the Chinese currency’s flaws

Juhana Vartiainen on a Finnish trial to see the effects of a citizen’s salary

Also in this issue

Catherine Fieschi looks at the re-emergence of the notion of sanctuary

Israeli tanks encounter Syrian soldiers giving themselves up as POWs on the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War in June 1967

Burhan Wazir looks at an account of the war that remains the most consequential of all the regional wars in the Middle East

Ahmed Sékou Touré led Guinea to independence from France in 1958

Escaping the past has been a thirty-year journey, writes Paul Melly

Kate Connolly looks at Protestantism’s influence on German politics

The EU parliament’s Brexit negotiator and former Belgian prime minister has strong views on how to fix the weaknesses of the European Union. Here are five things he told an audience at Chatham House on January 30.

Starfish founder who offers refugees support on the Greek island of Lesbos

In his first two weeks in the White House Donald Trump delighted his supporters and spread consternation around the world. Here are some of his concrete actions

The word ‘radicalization’ has been used intensively over the past decade to talk about recruitment to extremist terrorism, usually within an Islamist framework. But why do we use it?