A place for extremism: Nativist grievance, frustrated expectations, and the spatial dynamics of the global city

This research investigates the causal pathways linking nativist grievance, conceptualised as territorial status anxiety and the defence of neighbourhood boundaries in super-diverse environments, to extremist violent ideation, mediated by relative deprivation. Developing a spatially-sensitive theoretical model, the paper argues that the global city (London) functions not merely as an inanimate stage, but as an active engine that fundamentally constitutes political grievance. Through integrating scalar articulation, affective geographies, and classical urban sociology, the study explains how hyper-local urban conditions generate, rather than just amplify, radical sentiment. We test a moderated mediation model using a large United Kingdom survey subset (n = 2377). The statistical analysis reveals that nativist grievance directly heightens perceptions of relative deprivation. Crucially, even when accounting for employment and non-Christian religious affiliation, this causal link is notably amplified within the capital. This spatial dynamic is driven by the city's affective and scalar properties: severe spatial inequalities, racialised gentrification, and precarious labour markets converge to structurally frustrate the expectations of a younger, educated urban bourgeoisie. Consequently, this materially grounded relative deprivation emerges as the primary predictor for the justification of political violence. This relationship is markedly stronger in London and operates across majority-minority demographic divides. The findings establish London as an archetype for a broader ‘global city dynamic,’ demonstrating that contemporary extremism studies must adopt place-based models to understand how high-inequality metropolitan environments actively manufacture territorial and affective-economic radicalisation.