The erosion of conceptual clarity in the study of political violence

The growing tendency to classify perpetrators of political violence as ideologically "mixed, unclear, or unstable," epitomized by the "salad bar of ideologies" metaphor, reflects a broader erosion of conceptual clarity in the study of political violence. This commentary engages Horgan and Shayler's (2026) critique of the salad bar construct and argues that their diagnosis, while accurate, does not go far enough. Four interrelated concerns are developed. First, the designation of cases as ideologically incoherent is frequently a measurement of the field's declining ideological literacy rather than of perpetrators' beliefs, as analysts unfamiliar with the intellectual genealogies of violent movements perceive fragments where a coherent worldview exists. Second, motivational complexity was always the norm, and heterogeneous motives at the individual level do not indicate ideological absence, as patterns of target selection continue to reveal specific ideological visions. Third, ideologies evolve while maintaining core principles, and ostensibly new formations, including the Great Replacement, militant accelerationism, and incel misogyny, are better understood as new customs of older traditions. Fourth, the field's over-reliance on manifestos, which are performative and curated documents, produces artifactual findings of incoherence that dissolve when the full corpus of a perpetrator's discourse is utilized. Restoring conceptual clarity will require renewed investment in the comparative, historical, and discourse-based study of violent ideologies.