摘要：Although radicalization leading to violence is a sociopolitical phenomenon, its growing impact on psychological distress and acts of violence increasingly imposes it as a public health issue. (1-3) Current approaches have rather unsuccessfully tried to target individuals at risk of committing terrorist acts and have focused on those who are in contact with the criminal justice system, (4) neglecting to a large extent the study of risk and protective factors in the general population. (5) In spite of this, it is to be noted that all national and international plans coincide in putting forward a preventive approach that may appear to be in line with a public health perspective. However, in partial contradiction to these political discourses emphasizing early prevention, the focus of implemented programs is mostly put on secondary prevention (trying to detect and treat at-risk individuals) while primary prevention remains very poorly defined in terms of objectives and associated outcomes. By providing a wider picture on the associated factors that can be modified through intervention, a public health approach can pave the way toward the development and implementation of effective interventions in different settings. (6) Furthermore, a public health framework offers the interdisciplinary approach that is needed to disentangle the context-independent and context-specific individual and societal determinants, as well as to identify clusters of services and multiple levels of action (primary, secondary, and tertiary) for preventing radicalization. (2, 7) Such a framework could also help design and implement strategies at a population level, as previously shown in the contexts of street violence and bioterrorism. (8) Most of the current theoretical models coincide in proposing to understand the shift leading from radicalization of opinion and discourse to violent radicalization without envisioning the other outcomes of radicalization processes and their correlates. In this paper we propose that there is an urgent need to improve, through research, the comprehensiveness of the available radicalization models and better represent the complexity of the phenomenon, in order to inform community, institutional, and state prevention programs and policies.
