A suite of recent troubling events have once again shone a spotlight on extremist violence, especially the kind involving online radicalisation of young people.

The devastating Islamic State (IS) attack in Moscow on 22 March bought home the reality that the terrorism threat remains. The defeat of the territorial IS caliphate five years ago was accompanied by a respite from the global campaign of attacks that commenced with the declaration of the pseudo state on 29 June 2014. The news from Moscow is that the IS threat is back.

Just days after the deadly Westfield Bondi attacks, a second knife attack in Sydney has generated widespread shock and grief. This time, a 16-year-old entered an Assyrian church and rushed forward to stab the popular bishop presiding over a service, together with a priest who rushed to his defence. The shocking events were captured on the church’s video stream, and the news quickly reached thousands of members of Sydney’s large Assyrian community.

President Vladimir Putin has long sought to restore Russia’s global status after the personally and nationally humiliating defeat of the Cold War. One of the ways he has done so is through Russia’s involvement in the Middle East – highlighted by Russia’s 2015 military intervention in Syria but also evidenced in many other ways. By acting as a spoiler in Afghanistan, Putin also sought to accelerate and take advantage of the United States’ own humiliating withdrawal from the region to shore up Russia’s position as a major power.

Most contemporary research on extremism focuses on fringe groups that seek to overturn the status quo in a given society. Therefore, in the academic literature, we find a widespread, but not universal, belief that extremism is by definition a fringe behavior that runs counter to dominant social norms. In this paper, I make the case that regardless of whether the extremist group is fringe or dominant, extremist beliefs do not fundamentally change in character.