In the spirit of the World Council on Intercultural and Global Competence, intercultural understanding must extend beyond celebrating difference to also confronting the difficult question of how violence is linguistically and morally legitimised. Extremist actors rarely present their actions as “wrong”; rather, they justify them through strategic narratives of victimhood, moral duty, divine authority, and collective defence, designed to normalise harm and recruit support. Understanding these justificatory discourses is therefore a prerequisite to global competence: it equips scholars…