The Myth That Cracked
For decades, the Netherlands wore its reputation for tolerance like a badge of honour. Amsterdam’s canals, the country’s liberal social policies, and its historical embrace of multiculturalism created an image of a nation that had solved the puzzle of living together across difference. Yet scratch beneath this polished surface, and a more troubling picture emerges. Recent years have witnessed a visible shift in the Dutch social fabric as the nation drifts from this historical reputation, a nationalist myth that contemporary scholarship increasingly challenges. From the childcare benefits scandal that disproportionately targeted dual-nationality families to clandestine state surveillance of mosques, institutional discrimination has become impossible to ignore. These practices reflect a persistent post-colonial legacy that continues to shape modern administrative conduct and public discourse, manifesting as institutional racism within government ministries and the dismissal of research into anti-Muslim discrimination.
This environment provides the critical backdrop for understanding why certain individuals might condone violence for political objectives. It confirms that the historical myth of Dutch tolerance no longer provides an accurate map of contemporary social reality. When citizens perceive that their individual rights are conditional, granted or withheld based on their background, the social contract begins to fray. This fraying is not abstract; it is felt in everyday encounters, in the workplace, on public transport, and across social media platforms where stigmatisation spreads with alarming efficiency.
Beyond the Headlines
When we read about radicalisation in the news, the explanations offered are often deceptively simple. Religious ideology, we are told, drives young people toward extremism. Economic deprivation provides the fertile soil. Foreign conflicts offer the spark. Yet these narratives, while containing grains of truth, fundamentally misdiagnose the condition. They treat symptoms as causes and, in doing so, lead us toward policy responses that risk exacerbating the very problems they seek to solve.
This open access paper, recently published in Politics, Religion, and Ideology on 18 June, investigates the pathways through which perceived discrimination and social exclusion translate into the endorsement of political violence in the Netherlands. The research concludes that extremist sentiments emerge from the psycho-social consequences of blocked social recognition and institutional exclusion, rather than from religious identity. This is a crucial distinction. It shifts our analytical gaze from what people believe to how they are treated, from theology to sociology, from individual pathology to collective experience. The quantitative findings indicate that Muslim identity is not an inherent predictor of extremist attitudes; rather, its influence is fully mediated by experiences of discrimination and the subsequent cultivation of collective grievance and future pessimism. In other words, being Muslim does not predispose someone toward supporting violence. Being systematically excluded, surveilled, and denied dignity does.
Furthermore, this psycho-social response to systemic unfairness operates consistently across both Muslim and non-Muslim cohorts. This universality is perhaps the paper’s most striking finding. The mechanisms that transform exclusion into anger do not respect the boundaries we typically draw between majority and minority, between “us” and “them”. They are human mechanisms, rooted in the fundamental need for recognition and the profound damage inflicted when that recognition is withheld.
The Paradox of the Privileged
Here is where the paper challenges conventional wisdom most directly. We might assume that economic precarity, unemployment, insecure housing, and fragmented labour create the conditions for radicalisation. The precariat, that growing class of workers caught in cycles of temporary contracts and zero-hour arrangements, would seem the obvious candidate for political disillusionment. Yet the data reveal something unexpected: individuals in full-time stable employment report higher levels of violent endorsement than those in part-time or non-employment.
This finding highlights the radicalising potential of status incongruence. When labour market integration fails to provide corresponding social or cultural recognition, resentment festers. A person may hold a steady job, pay their taxes, and fulfil every societal expectation, yet still feel invisible, disrespected, or displaced. Moghaddam identifies this form of status incongruence as a critical factor in the development of radical sentiments, as resentment manifests when individuals perceive a significant discrepancy between their societal contributions and the levels of respect they receive. The immigrant who works night shifts but is never promoted. The native-born worker who watches their town transform while their wages stagnate. Both experience a specific form of disenfranchisement that generates the future pessimism necessary for extremist sentiments to take root.
This challenges the conventional precarity thesis and demands that we look beyond material conditions to the qualitative nature of work and social position. Economic stability does not inherently guarantee social integration. The psychological dissonance between material security and social recognition can generate resentment that exceeds the frustrations associated with economic deprivation alone.
Voices from the Ground
To understand how these statistical abstractions manifest in lived reality, the study turns to qualitative interviews with young adults aged 18 to 25. Their testimonies anchor the regression coefficients in concrete social experience, revealing how institutional practices, societal shifts, and spatial inequalities generate the grievances and pessimism that the econometric models identify as significant.
For young Dutch Muslims, the burden of securitisation weighs heavily. One young man shared: “You see it in the news, or you hear politicians discuss our neighbourhood like it is a warzone… They see a concentration of Muslims and assume the worst.” Over thirty percent of surveyed Muslim youth reported feeling directly discriminated against by state bodies, expressing a deep sense of being unfairly targeted by the very institutions meant to protect them. This experience ironically undermines the security that state institutions aim to provide, forcing many to view their immediate neighbourhoods as necessary shields from a hostile broader society.
Yet the ethnic majority youth tell a parallel story, rooted not in securitisation but in relative deprivation and status anxiety. They report alienation stemming from perceptions that Dutch culture and traditions are under direct threat from migration, Islam, and globalism. They frequently view multiculturalism as actively eroding community cohesion and public safety. Their mistrust of government is high, significantly exacerbated by state measures which frequently serve as an entry point into conspiratorial thinking. Nearly a third of the nationalist youth surveyed supported right-wing conspiracy theories, illustrating a deep anti-institutional sentiment.
The synthesis of these testimonies demonstrates that the psychosocial response to exclusion operates as a universal mechanism across demographic divides. While the structural triggers differ significantly – state-sponsored suspicion, Islamophobia, and racialisation for the Muslim minority versus status decline, cultural anxiety, and perceived loss of community cohesion for the ethnic majority – the resulting psychological trajectory is functionally identical. Both cohorts exhibit parallel patterns of high distress, lowered resilience, and a draining of psychosocial resources when confronted with persistent barriers to social recognition.
Toward a New Conversation
The implications of these findings for policy and practice are substantial. As the data demonstrate, addressing the root causes of extremist sentiments requires addressing narrow, security-focused counter-radicalisation frameworks that disproportionately target specific minority communities. Such approaches risk exacerbating the very stigmatisation and alienation they seek to mitigate. When Muslims are constructed as a “suspect community” through intensified counter-radicalisation frameworks, the resulting Islamophobia frequently leads to the inadvertent stigmatisation of the very communities these policies intend to protect.
Instead, strategies must be anchored in comprehensive public health and social inclusion paradigms that address the eco-biopsychosocial determinants of grievance. For ethnic minority youth, this necessitates rigorous, systemic efforts to dismantle institutional racism in the labour market and education systems, ensuring equitable access to social mobility. For the ethnic majority, policies must address the disconnect and status anxiety generated by rapid socio-economic transitions. Interventions must focus on advancing genuine bridging social capital, creating inclusive civic spaces that validate diverse identities while dismantling the “us versus them” narratives mobilised by populist and extremist factions.
This research determines that the support of political violence in the Netherlands is a symptom of blocked social recognition and structural exclusion. In demonstrating that the psychosocial consequences of discrimination operate universally across both ethnic minority and ethnic majority youth, this study challenges exceptionalist narratives that link extremism to specific cultural or religious identities. The pathway to radicalisation runs through blocked dignity and denied recognition for all individuals, rendering violent political means an attractive alternative to a failing social contract.
Addressing the spectre of radicalisation requires a steadfast commitment to remedying systemic inequalities, furthering inclusive national identities, and ensuring that the social contract extends equitable recognition and dignity to all citizens. The Netherlands, like many European nations, stands at a crossroads. It can continue to police the symptoms of social fracture, or it can begin the harder, more essential work of healing the structural wounds that produce them. The data are clear. The choice remains ours.