“Loneliness and Radicalization”- Sanna Karoliina Tirkkonen (University of Helsinki) and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen (Tilburg University),
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2025
By Ruth Rebecca Tietjen and Sanna Tirkkonen
The British Netflix series Adolescence (2025) powerfully illustrates how feelings of rejection and loneliness, experiences of cyberbullying, and a lack of positive masculine role models can turn into an explosive mixture that leads to misogynistic attitudes, aggression, and violence.
In the series, we accompany Jamie after his arrest, suspected of having murdered his schoolmate Katie. While first appearing as an innocent, shy, and withdrawn teenager, the series gradually reveals Jamie’s hidden aggression and misogynistic attitudes, but also his deep sense of isolation, rejection, helplessness, and emotional distance from his family. We learn how he has suffered from bullying, see him searching for alternative models of masculinity, and come to understand that he has been drawn into the online world. We witness how limited resources in education have led to a chaotic school environment where young people are left alone with their struggles while adults are out of touch with their children’s social realities. Jamie craves being seen and recognized by authority figures and peers, and he lashes out in aggressive outbursts during interactions with his female therapist.
The series powerfully demonstrates how loneliness can foster processes of radicalization. The fact that it has been taken up in school curricula in the UK, France, and the Netherlands underlines the public recognition of the importance of the topic. However, despite growing attention to loneliness as a public health issue and social crisis, the political dimensions and stakes of loneliness are still insufficiently understood. Our article “Loneliness and Radicalization” fills this gap by offering an analysis of the role of loneliness in processes of radicalization that integrates theoretical and normative research with case studies, thus extending our previous work, “The Rage of Lonely Men: Loneliness and Ressentiment in the Online Movement of ‘Involuntary Celibates’ (Incels),” on the misogynistic online movement of self-proclaimed involuntary celibates.
In our newest article, we take Hannah Arendt’s account of loneliness as the breeding ground of terror as a starting point and combine it with a critical phenomenological analysis of loneliness in contemporary forms of radicalization. Rather than conceiving of loneliness as an individual psychological condition and pathology, Arendt presents loneliness as an inherently political phenomenon. She posits that it is no longer an experience of the few but rather a defining condition of modern liberal subjectivity itself.
While we agree with Arendt that loneliness is structurally produced and that the sense of powerlessness and superfluousness connected to loneliness is a fertile ground for radicalization, we also go beyond her analysis. We use the method of critical phenomenology to show how the social desires and needs underlying our experiences of loneliness are shaped by historical and cultural norms and expectations. By contrast, Arendt seems to take these desires and needs as given, or at least does not explicitly reflect on how loneliness varies across social contexts. Moreover, while Arendt is primarily interested in loneliness as a mass phenomenon affecting us all equally, we use the tools of critical phenomenology to show that members of different social groups are affected differently by loneliness and experience it in unique ways.
To carve out how loneliness and the responses to it are shaped by our social positionality, we analyze two types of cases and sources. First, we explore representations of loneliness in manifestos of right-wing lone-actor terrorists. This includes members of the incel movement, such as Elliot Rodger and Chris Harper-Mercer, replacement conspiracy theorists, such as Anders Behring Breivik and Brenton Tarrant, and the case of Jim David Adkisson, a church shooter motivated by hatred of minorities and liberal politics. Second, we explore representations of loneliness in media portraits of female Western ISIS affiliates. Here, we discuss the cases of “Alex,” a young woman from rural Washington state, Kimberly Pullman, a Canadian nurse in training and mother traumatized by sexual violence, and the Bethnal Green Girls from London. Our analysis exposes both structural conditions crosscutting both sets of cases and features that reflect how loneliness and its politicization are shaped by the social positionality of these people. For example, as one common feature, we identify structural transformations of the world of work that leave large segments of society with the sense of not being able to make a meaningful contribution to collective life. As unique features, we expose the sense of existential threat manifested in the analyzed manifestos and the sense of marginalization connected to religious and gender identity in the cases of the female ISIS affiliates.
With our article, we hope to draw attention to the still underexplored political dimensions and stakes of loneliness. We want to highlight that loneliness not only affects health and well-being but also core democratic values, such as participation, equality, trust, and autonomy. Moreover, we want to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between loneliness and radicalization, acknowledging that structural conditions such as meritocracy, austerity politics, patriarchy, and white Christian supremacy affect all of us – but do so differently, depending on our social positionality. Importantly, we reject the demonization of loneliness that often comes with a nostalgic defense of traditional family life and communities; instead, we think it is important to acknowledge the complexity and ambiguity of both loneliness and belonging. We hope that our work will encourage further empirical research on the role of loneliness in radicalization and inspire interdisciplinary dialogue on how to address it. Ultimately, our vision is a society that enables all individuals to make a meaningful contribution to public life and offers diverse narratives, supportive communities, and non-violent ways of responding to experiences of loneliness and marginalization.