The familiarity with terms such as fundamentalism, radicalism and terrorism, acquired by the public thanks to the media, is the starting point for this paper to analyze and contextualize them in order to highlight relevant paths towards radicalization. The paper, focusing in particular on the Mediterranean area, after addressing the political background as one of the driver for radicalization, takes into account three specific scenarios, namely Italy, Libya and Syria. For each of them the state of the art about recruiting and radicalizing processes, fulfilled also thanks to the use of the Internet and Social Networks, is drawn to conclude that it is necessary to “think out of the box” to deploy new tools to confront them.