In addition to an intensive academic and security policy focus on the phenomenon of Islamism, an extensive and diverse landscape of radicalization prevention has also developed since the early 2010s. Considerable efforts have been made at both federal, state and municipal level to establish effective radicalization prevention. While there was initially talk of a proliferation of prevention work due to the large number of different projects, prevention work has now developed into a significant field of action for civil society (Ceylan and Kiefer 2018 and 2022). In the sense of accompanying this development, the following article discusses the question of how prevention actors construct images of groups in preventive practice in the field of religiously motivated extremism. The concept of construction refers to the epistemological assumption that perception and cognition are primarily understood as constructive and less as depictive activities. To answer the research question, 18 partially standardized expert interviews were conducted with prevention actors at secondary and tertiary prevention levels and evaluated using content analysis. Since the descriptions of addressees and their radicalization processes presented in the interviews are understood as creative constructions by the prevention actors interviewed, the results presented in this article can serve as starting points for a reflection on preventive practice.
