Youth Bulge in a Pandemic-Stricken World: Social-Psychology and the Radicalisation Concern

Introduction

Today, nations across the world are grappling with health-related effects of COVID-19. However, as history bears testament, any pandemic is more than a mere health scare. The United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report (1994) emphasized the overarching significance of human security as a non-conventional security threat and identified health security as its important pillar.

Pandemics are a human security concern for their capacity to harm humans on a global scale. However, human life does not come in compartmentalised and insulated boxes. Different aspects of life are entwined with one another in a manner that one aspect not only affects the others but also is, in turn, affected by them. Analysts (Sprout & Sprout, 1968; Aron & Patz, 2001) opine that any alterations in the natural world are sure to have negative, long lasting but sometimes delayed impacts on international relations. Thus, any pandemic has the propensity to leave wide-scale economic, social, political and even security spillover effects. Consequently, while human security is in itself significant, any lapse to ensure it has the propensity to impact the societal, national and international security.

Not all pandemics have the tendency to automatically lead to conflicts per se. Economic instability, political issues of multifarious varieties, lack of assuring societal environments, religious and social polarisation, etc. are just some issues that qualify to lead to conflicts. Having any one of these features or their eclectic mix raises the threat of radicalisation on a society’s probability bar.

Research (Batool, 2019) has concluded that radicalisation is a complex blend of cognitive and social-psychological processes that entail image creation and image reinforcement – both of which occur due to familial, social and political socialisation at the psychological level. Religion, the usual suspect, has a secondary role in radicalisation as it is used as a tool in retrospect to justify violence that would otherwise be so inhumane that it would be unacceptable in the absence of this religious justification.

Taken in conjunction with the fact that many developing countries across the world boast of young populations, this issue becomes all the more significant. While pandemics influence all age groups, contagion archives reveal that youth are psychologically the most vulnerable to their impacts (Price-Smith, 2008). It goes without saying that a dominos effect is expected: the pandemic leading to decreased livelihoods and increased social seclusion which will, in turn, enhance frustration among youth. This will positively correlate with the frustration-aggression dyad propounded by Dollard et al. (1939) and will increase cognitive distress and dissonance - thereby, increasing the youth’s propensity to radicalise. Spending more time on the Internet due to lack of outdoor activities during the pandemic will not only multiply their prospects of recruitment by extremist organisations, but also expose youth to extremist literature.

Moreover, latest COVID-19 figures emanating from John Hopkins University show that while the pandemic struck the developed world in 2020, the major brunt of its impact in 2021 has been on the developing world - that is, Africa, Asia and Southern America (Kamp et al., 2021). As these are exactly the same regions exhibiting youth bulge, it becomes all the more pertinent to conduct this study at this juncture.

This is an age of pandemic, youth bulge (Lin, 2012), social media and radicalisation. It is thus an opportune moment to reimagine the impacts of pandemics and conduct an investigation into their propensity to spiral into radicalisation. The aim of this chapter is to plug this very literature gap, transcend the truncated understanding on pandemics and the myopic traditions of collecting mere statistics and instead to prepare for their profounder reverberations and aftershocks.