McCants and Meserole are not the only ones to point at poverty, urban marginalization and relative deprivation as crucial factors caus-ing jihadist radicalization. This is actually one of the most recurrcaus-ing explanations of jihadism in public debates: following the dramatic ji-hadist attacks that occurred between 2015 and 2017 on the French soil, policy-makers and the media immediately connected the origins of radicalization with the situation of the banlieues12, i.e. the urban outskirts of main French cities, characterized by a vast socio-eco-nomic disadvantage, high levels of segregation and large concentra-tions of young French citizens of North African, Turkish and African origin, where Islam has gained a peculiar salience and visibility. Ten years after the most violent and widespread uprisings of recent French history, that had taken place in these areas, les banlieues were back in the spotlight and depicted as “the culprit”.
The harsh life conditions of banlieues are well known and have been amply documented. Studies on this issue identify two separate dynamics, which, precisely in the contexts of banlieues, intertwine and reinforce each other: on the one hand, mass unemployment, that has been spreading among the immigrant population since the second half of the 1970s due to de-industrialization processes; on the other hand, the concentration and segregation of unemployment in specific, circumscribed areas. These two phenomena created a cycle of perpetu-ation and reproduction, the one resulting from the other.13
12 With reference to the Charlie Hebdo January 2015 attacks, the then-French Prime Minister Manuel Valls spoke of the existence of a “territorial, social and ethnic apartheid” regarding the immigrant population, “victim of discrimination”, “relegated in peripheral areas”, dominated by “social misery” which risks creating new
“ghettoes”. Cf. “Valls évoque ‘un apartheid territorial, social, ethnique en France’”, Le Monde, 20.01.2015. Similarly, the French Socialist party deputy Malek Boutih, who suggested that so-called “sensitive neighbourhoods” (as the more problematic and deprived urban areas are called in the French administrative and political slang) be “put under special administration” in order to avoid their transformation into “fer-tile ground” for the spread of radicalisation phenomena; cf. “Malek Boutih plaide pour la mise sous tutelle de quartiers sensibles”, Le Monde, 20.01.2015.
13 C. Avenel, Sociologie des quartiers sensibles (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010).
The immigrant population that was massively employed in large French industries in the post-war period and had settled in the vast social housing districts at the periphery of industrial cities near production plants, was left jobless following the colossal de-industrialization and economic crisis that ensued the Oil Shock of 1973. In the following decades, unemployment became endemic in those areas where the immigrant population was concentrated. The physical and social distance of residents from work opportunities in the city, the significant levels of discrimination both at school and in the job market towards youths with an Africa or North-African background and, lastly, the development of a parallel economy (based on drug dealing) all contribute to explain this dynamic of reproduction,14 which has even led to an increase in the levels of segregation.15 Thus, spatial relegation soon became social relegation, in a vicious cycle that has become difficult to break and has been affecting children and grandchildren of first immigrants for a long time.16 In these areas, the opportunities for social mobility are significantly lower, to the extent that it is possible to speak of “social determinism” with respect to the conditioning exerted by segregation on banlieues' inhabitants.17
Much literature has been devoted to the repeated failures of the so-called Politique de la Ville –i.e. the various policies adopted by dif-ferent French governments aimed at improving the life conditions in these areas, for instance in the domains of housing and education.
14 Ibid.
15 J.-L. Pan Ké Shon, Residential Segregation of Immigrants in France: an Overview, INED-“Population and Societies”, n. 477, April 2011.
16 In the so-called “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” (ZUS) the proportion of large families and people with a foreign nationality is significantly higher (up to three times) compared to the national average. While the French national unemployment rate is of approximately 10%, in the ZUS it reaches 23%, and up to 42% for young people aged 15 to 24, compared to 23% in the rest of the country (ONZUS-Obser-vatoire National des Zones Urbaines Sensibles, Rapport 2014). This is particularly significant if we consider that the most represented age range in these areas is that of under-25s. School dropout is extremely high and students of immigrant origin who reside in these areas are significantly higher probabilities to be channelled towards VET and less qualified educational tracks.
17 G. Kepel, Banlieue de la République. Société, politique et religion à Clichy-sous-Bois et Montfermeil (Paris: Gallimard, 2012).
For a number of reasons, these policy interventions have not reached the hoped-for objectives18and the socio-economic situation of the banlieues remains appalling.
The empirical studies focusing on the banlieues' children of im-migrants demonstrate that the lives of these youths, often so turbulent and precarious, present recurrent traits, such as the impossibility of finding a job, the perception of education as useless, a day-to-day ex-istence, often conducive to petty delinquency. In particular, these stud-ies emphasize the galère experienced by these youths19-i.e., the daily presence of violence, of difficult family relations, of clashes with the symbols of the State, embodied in policemen or teachers, perceived as
“racists”.20Indeed, a dominant theme in these studies is precisely how discrimination and racism persist in many patent or subtle forms and are still largely responsible for unemployment and educational diffi-culties.21
Still, although the marginalization and the exclusion experi-enced in these areas are unquestionable, establishing a cause-effect re-lationship between the segregation of immigrants and their descend-ants and jihadist radicalization seems reductive and problematic, in light of the complexity of contemporary jihadism and of its evolu-tions. More generally, the numerous studies that have explored the possible links between socio-economic deprivation and various
mani-18 C. Avenel, Sociologie des quartiers sensibles (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010);
R. Epstein, La rénovation urbaine. Démolition-reconstruction de l'état (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2013); G. Kepel, Banlieue de la République. Société, politique et religion à Clichy-sous-Bois et Montfermeil (Paris: Gallimard, 2012).
19 F. Dubet, La galère. Jeunes en survie (Paris: Fayard, 1987).
20 F. Khosrokhavar, L'islam des jeunes (Paris: Flammarion, 1997); M. Shirali, Entre islam et démocratie. Parcours de jeunes français d'aujourd'hui (Paris: Armand Colin, 2007); L. Mucchielli, “Autumn 2005: a Review of the Most Important Riot in the History of French Contemporary Society”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35, 5 (2009), pp. 731-751.
21 R. Silberman, R. Alba, I. Fournier, “Segmented Assimilation in France?
Discrimination in the Labor Market against the Second Generation”, Ethnic and Ra-cial Studies, 30, 1 (2007), pp. 1-27; D. Meurs, B. Lhommeau, M. Okba, Emplois, salaires et mobilité intergénérationnelle, INED Documents de travail, n. 182, 2012; J.
Fredette, Constructing Muslims in France. Discourse, Public Identity and the Politics of Citizenship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014); D. Meurs, “The role of discrimination in immigrant unemployment”, in INED-Population & Societies, n. 546, July/August 2017.
festations of terrorism –including the jihadist one-refute the existence of a clear-cut, linear relationship between poverty and political viol-ence. Actually, it has often been found that large sectors of the jihadist population are composed by educated and highly-educated individuals and that similar forms of Islamist extremism have significant probabil-ities to be withheld by the well-educated, both in Western and non-Western countries.22The fact that Muslims in USA and Canada enjoy a far better socio-economic condition that in European countries did not make USA and Canada immune to the surge in home-grown ji-hadism militancy on their territories. It is true that, at least in the case of France, many of the youths who have embraced jihadism and have either attempted to carry out an attack on the French soil or have joined jihadist groups like ISIS or the Al-Nusra front were economic under-performers. In numerous cases, they fit into the stereotype of the banlieusard, with a turbulent life, “sans père ni repère” (“without father nor reference points”), of the young person who is off the rails, without a life project, who has accumulated failures, who feels he or she is the object of stigma and disdain as an “Arab” or a “Muslim”, who has been the victim and/or the perpetrator of violence, who has been a gang member and was involved in petty crime, psychologically fragile and angry at an “unjust” society.23
Nonetheless, at the same time, a consistent fraction of homegrown French jihadists is made up of middle-class individuals or converts. These simple observations can suffice to undermine the lin-earity of the argument that posits a nexus between poverty and jihadist radicalization, even for the French case. Therefore, the social-eco-nomic disadvantage affecting the banlieues, alone, cannot account for the motives behind the “success” of the jihadist militancy and narrat-ive. If this were the case, then all of the millions of French (and
22 For a brief analysis of these analyses, see L. Vidino, F. Marone, E. Enten-mann, Fear Thy Neighbor. Jihadist Attacks in the West (Milano: Ledizioni Ledipub-lishing, 2017).
23 F. Khosrokhavar, Radicalisation (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2014); F. Khosrokhavar, “Les trajectoires jihadistes des jeunes français”, Études, n. 6 (2015), pp. 33-44; D. Thomson, Les Français jihadistes (Paris: Les Arènes, 2014).
European) Muslims, who suffer form the same profound marginalization,24 would espouse jihadism, while only a statistically insignificant minor-ity of them does. This question remains unanswered by the approaches that connect radicalization and political violence with poverty. It seems misleading, then, to concentrate only on social-economic deprivation as the one driver of radicalization. At best, it might be one among a series of factors, working in conjunction with them, and that banlieues might act as catalysts or accelerators within the intricate dy-namics of radicalization processes-as we shall see later. Incidentally, the policy implication of this remark is that even an ambitious social policy agenda, aimed at improving the conditions of degraded and se-gregated neighbourhoods-albeit necessary and desirable-would not be sufficient as the only action for preventing radicalization, as other is-sues seem to be at stake.