By Frøja Storm-Mathisen

This article introduces the concept ‘narrative normalization of violence’ as a theoretical framework for exploring the interplay between crime and marginality in street culture. Drawing from 4 months of ethnographic observations and 24 qualitative interviews with young men involved in a violent street culture in Oslo, Norway, the study identifies three prevalent narratives. The first, ‘Part of the game’, minimizes the danger of violence; the second, ‘It’s all about respect’, internalizes violence as part of a desired subcultural identity; and the third, ‘We come from concrete’, emphasizes the importance of belonging. In distinctive and important ways these narratives shape collective energies that influence beliefs, attitudes and aspirations, which work to narratively render the exceptional nature of violence manageable and mundane.

The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 65, Issue 1, January 2025, Pages 37–53,

By Sébastien Tutenges andJonathan Ilan

For over a decade, jihadi terrorism in Europe, and the recruitment of Europeans to fight for ISIS in Syria, have increasingly involved marginalized youths from a social context of street culture, illegal drug use and crime. Existing theoretical models of the crime-terrorism nexus and radicalization arguably do not sufficiently explain the fluid and dynamic ways by which the street cultural come to be politico-religiously violent. This paper provides a novel retheorization, the street-jihadi spectrum, which is better placed to explain a wide range of behaviours, from the merely stylistic to the spectacularly violent. On the street culture end it includes subcultural play with provocative jihadi symbols and on the jihadi end the terrorism of ‘gangster-jihadists’. We emphasize that the spectrum, consisting of a multitude of confluences of street and jihadi cultures, also includes resistance to jihadism.

European Journal of Criminology 2024, Vol. 21(2) 210–230 © The Author(s) 2023