Focused Genealogical Configuration Analysis: A Methodological Framework for Tracing Persistent Psychological Configurations in Political Violence and Adversarial Mobilisation

Adversarial mobilisation succeeds not by constructing psychology from zero but by activating cognitive-affective configurations that populations carry as historically installed substrates — architectures of identity, threat, grievance, and sacred necessity that persist beneath continuous surface ideological mutation. Focused Genealogical Configuration Analysis (FGCA) is a structured qualitative methodology that traces the historical installation, transmission, and contemporary availability of these psychological capture architectures across documentary evidence. Synthesising cognitive historiography, microhistorical evidential reasoning, and Annales-school mentalités reconstruction, FGCA provides a unified analytical procedure for a class of problem none of those traditions individually addresses: the systematic tracing of persistent psychological configurations across historical stratigraphic layers. The framework identifies four capture mechanisms — identity fusion, grievance inversion, sacralised violence, and cosmic dualism — through a formal three-outcome taxonomy distinguishing documented transmission, mediated persistence, and structural recurrence. Operational outputs include configuration profiles, capture depth estimates, continuity classifications, carrier maps, and downstream receptivity hypotheses. Applications span radicalisation, terrorism, hybrid warfare, mnemonic statecraft, and extremist aesthetic production. The synthesis and its specific application to this problem-class constitute the original methodological contribution.