Discrimination, grievance, and the endorsement of political violence in The Netherlands

This paper 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. 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. Furthermore, this psycho-social response to systemic unfairness operates consistently across both Muslim and non-Muslim cohorts. Challenging the conventional precarity thesis, the data reveal that individuals in full-time stable employment report higher levels of violent endorsement than those in part-time or non-employment, highlighting the radicalising potential of status incongruence. To test this theoretical framework of mediation, the study employs hierarchical and ordered logit models drawing upon a national survey dataset of 1,896 respondents. These statistical pathways are contextualized by a thematic analysis of a qualitative dataset of 32 semi-structured interviews with young adults in the Netherlands (aged 18–25) – comprising 21 Muslim minority youth and 11 ethnic majority youth – illustrating the diverse lived realities of stigmatisation and status anxiety.