Islamic Terrorism Research Articles

Political Rhetoric and Hate Speech in the Case of Shamima Begum

The relationship between political rhetoric and hate crime has been a topic of growing concern in recent years, with the narratives promoted by politicians widely seen as legitimating and inspiring hate crime as well as soothing or inflaming the tensions that result from antecedent hate crime events such as terrorist attacks. The potential return of so-called ‘IS bride’ Shamima Begum from a Syrian refugee camp in 2019, following her high-profile departure four years earlier, led to intense debate within the UK, particularly over the controversial removal of her citizenship by Home Secretary Sajid Javid. As an Islamist terrorism case with clear gendered dimensions, the Begum case was well-positioned to function as a hate crime trigger event. The divisiveness of this case was reflected in partisan political argument within the UK, and accompanied by high volumes of toxic and Islamophobic social media discussion alongside input from a variety of UK politicians. This paper offers a qualitative analysis of the political rhetoric promoted in the Twitter accounts of leading UK politicians in response to the citizenship decision, and subsequent developments between February and April 2019, such as the death of Begum’s child and the granting of legal aid to support her ongoing legal challenge. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of politicians’ online rhetoric, this study aims to establish the contribution of UK political rhetoric to the hate speech discourses that emerged online in response to this case.

Do Terrorists Get the Attention They Want?: COMPARING EFFECTS OF TERRORISM ACROSS EUROPE.

Terrorists aim at influencing audiences beyond their immediate victims, but can only achieve this if an attack receives sufficient public attention. Previous research shows that terrorism can affect public opinion, but these studies are mainly based on emblematic single cases and relate to varying measures of influence, which are difficult to compare. This research focuses on the first-order effect of terrorism: attention. To analyze whether terrorists get attention, we combine a quasi-experimental approach for causal identification with a comparative design. We compile data from Eurobarometer surveys and contrast responses of more than 80,000 individuals surveyed before and after five diverse Islamist attacks in Europe in 2013–2019. Attention to terrorism increases in all targeted countries, regardless of attack size. Yet, while all incidents raise attention to terrorism, only larger attacks exert a meaningful impact across Europe.

The Role of Women and Girls in the Eyes of Islamic State: A Content Analysis of Dabiq and Rumiyah Magazines

The article analyses a large content of the English-language magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah . They provide a significant amount of content for research on the role of women (mostly Western) in jihadi terrorism. The author attempts to understand the leading themes related to women and girls exploited in these sources. A major objective is to discover and understand the Islamic State's approach towards women and girls, as well as their role in the self-proclaimed caliphate. To reach this goal, quantitative and qualitative content analysis is used. Research confirmed that both magazines contain special sections for women and interviews with female followers. IS has proved to be relatively tolerant of the inconsistence of its ideology. The author acknowledges that the magazines discussed were inconsistent, or rather variant in the application of its message. This is particularly true to the role of women.

Competing visions for the EU’s southern strategy: Restraint, preventative engagement, and selective intervention

ABSTRACT The most powerful European Union (EU) member states have suffered devastating terrorist attacks in the past decades and identify Islamist terrorism as one of the most pressing threats to their national security. They recognize that instability in the southern neighbourhood has exacerbated the threat Islamist terrorism poses to their national security. Adopting an intergovernmental approach, I argue that member states’ southern strategies are a product of threat perceptions and policy response preferences. This article creates a typology of security strategies through using content analysis to categorize EU member states’ threat perceptions and policy response preferences as indicated in national security strategies produced in 2009–2018 period. Based on my analysis of member states’ threat perceptions and policy response preferences to threats emanating in the southern neighbourhood, I conceptualize three southern security strategies: restraint, preventative engagement, and selective intervention. Based on this typology, I identify the EU member states’ southern security strategy. Focusing particularly on the most powerful EU member states, namely the EU-5 , I then apply this typology to make some tentative predictions on the shifts in the EU’s southern strategy post-Brexit. I expect the EU’s southern security strategy to shift towards one of selective intervention in the post-Brexit period.

European Security – Islamist terrorist network in Bosnia and Herzegovina (original research)

Radical Islamic ideas, individuals, movements, organizations, but also states that have greatly contributed to the radicalization of the existing Muslim population of the Balkans and Bosnia and Herzegovina are not new. Ever since the Middle Ages, with the aggression and genocide committed by the Ottomans, the ideas of jihad have been present in various forms, especially in environments that interpret Islam as a great world religion in such a radical way. There is a noticeable connection between the bearers of jihadist ideas from World War II until today. This article not only provides a historical analysis of the preconditions for the widespread jihadist network that today produces jihad warriors who threaten the entire world but also provides an authentic overview of the preconditions of this global terrorist network to better understand elements such as this network – it’s functions, how it recruits new terrorists and how it uses the ideology of radical Islamists as a motive for committing serious crimes around the world. The schematic structure of the mujahedeen unit with command staff is shown, as well as the fact that the terrorists welcomed the authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina who tried to hide their presence and to relativize all the worst crimes committed by the mujahedin.

Emerging challenges for combating the financing of terrorism in the European Union: financing of violent right-wing extremism and misuse of new technologies

ABSTRACT This article explores two emerging challenges for combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) within the European Union (EU): the challenge to counter the financing of violent right-wing extremism/terrorism and the increasing misuse of new technologies, such as internet tools and cryptocurrencies for the financing of terrorism. Despite rising levels of violence emanating from transnational violent right-wing extremist networks and rising numbers of documented cases of the misuse of new technologies, a common understanding of the threat landscape is only now emerging. Existing EU CFT instruments, developed to primarily counter the threat emanating from Islamist terrorism, have not been adjusted sufficiently. Legislative, regulatory and operational gaps exist. However, a beginning multilateral discussion concerning the threat posed by right-wing extremism/terrorism, the Terrorism Content Online Regulation (TCO), the planned Digital Services Act (DSA), as well as the discussion concerning further regulating the cryptocurrency sector in the EU provide new opportunities.

Bombing It: The Meaning and Sources of Suicide Bombing Failure

Over the years, political scientists and policymakers have striven to understand the circumstances under which terrorists fail, operationally and strategically. However, the question of failure has less frequently been approached through the lens of any one specific tactic. This article asks: how should one define and understand the sources of suicide bombing failure? After introducing a new definition of suicide bombing failure, the article next uses probit model analysis to test planner (or “architect”) versus militant (or “attacker”) sources of failure by using a unique dataset detailing the suicide bombing efforts of three of the most active African jihadist terror groups which leveraged suicide terrorism from 2007 to 2020 — al-Shabaab, “Boko Haram,” and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (“AQIM”). It finds evidence that choices made by these groups’ “architects,” are most commonly correlated with suicide bombing failures, rather than operational failures by “attackers” themselves.

Political Islam, European Muslim and Terrorism Issues: A Reflection

In the period 2014-2015, the European Union was shaken by the influx of migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans (Eastern Europe) who increasingly flooded the western region of the white continent. In a March 2015 report, UNHCR said the conflicts in Iraq and Syria brought the number of asylum seekers in Western countries in 2014 to the highest level in 22 years. There were an estimated 866,000 asylum seekers in 2014. That number is a 45 percent increase compared to 2013. And, during the 2014-16 refugee crisis from the Middle East and Africa, millions of refugee flows from the Middle East and Africa were rejected. In this regard, Olivier Roy sees that in Europe itself there is a danger of radical Islamism, a Muslim terrorism movement that undermines European peace and undermines Western trust on Muslim communities and political Islam. This paper explains Roy's perspective and Islamic radicalism in Europe which does not benefit the position and image of Muslims in Europe and the West in general.

A Farewell to Firearms? The logic of weapon selection in terrorism: the case of jihadist attacks in Europe

ABSTRACT In the vast literature on terrorism the choice of weapons has received relatively limited attention, despite the importance and visibility of this topic. Building on the literature on innovation in terrorism, the article first proposes a multi-level analytical framework that helps study terrorist weapon selection. It then investigates the use of weapons in jihadist attacks in Europe from 2014, with the rise of the so-called Islamic State, until 2020, based on an original database. The empirical analysis shows that the two traditional types of weapon of modern terrorism, firearms and explosives, were largely replaced by more primitive tools like melee weapons. In fact, in recent years jihadist terrorists in Europe have become less technologically advanced. Based on the original analytical framework, the article examines the reasons of this evolution, paying special attention to the use of the most common type of weapon in the database, bladed weapons, and the most lethal type, firearms.

ISLAMIC TERRORISM AS A THREAT TO THE SECURITY OF EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

The article presents the analysis of the threat to the security of Eastern European countries posed by groups and individuals invoking the ideology of radical Islam. Particular attention is given to the region’s two biggest countries: Russia and Ukraine. After a general assessment of the terrorist threat in individual countries based on the Global Terrorism Index, the following are analysed: evolution of the terrorism of North Caucasus groups, scale of threat from the Islamic State, and particularly from foreign terrorist fi ghters (FTFs), as well as examples of homegrown Islamic terrorism in Russia.

Recruiting Foreign Warriors: Moral and Temporal Tropes in the Islamic State’sDabiq

AbstractTo commemorate its declaration of a global khilafah in 2014, the Islamic State (IS) began publishing an online magazine, Dabiq, which became one of its primary recruiting tools during its rise to infamy. By using rhetoric that recalls U.S. presidential war rhetoric, specifically, tropes of “justice” and “time,” the English-language version of Dabiq fulfilled both subversive and hegemonic functions. It disrupted the reductive discourse that equates Islamic terrorists only with barbaric aggression and rendered IS as a rational global actor. Through this subversive move, IS aligned its anti-imperial interests with potential recruits in English-speaking Western countries with similar proclivities. At the same time, through its use of dominant Western war tropes, IS made a hegemonic attempt to facilitate recruits’ cultural identification so they assume a congruence of interests with IS, leading to an alignment of motives. Dabiq thus fulfilled an imperial trajectory through (neo)imperial rhetorics of identification and control. IS’s strategic use of (neo)imperial tropes in English—language of the empire—in Dabiq hence complicates monolithic (and Oriental) perceptions of the relationship between empire, imperialism, and Islamic terrorism in contemporary global political discourse. In addition, the significance of (neo) imperial tropes expands the heuristic scope of the rhetoric of terrorism by highlighting the implications of imperial ambitions and use of (neo)imperial rhetoric for the rise of global Islamic terrorism.

Terrorism and Culture

This article addresses the question ‘can literature help us with terrorism?’ by interrogating the common assumption that terrorism always ‘has an agenda’ that needs to be understood and addressed. The article offers a critique of Robert Applebaum’s argument that Shakespeare’s Macbeth represents a denial of the political agenda of the Gunpowder Plot, and argues that terrorism – especially contemporary Islamic terrorism – is nihilistic, merely destructive and offers (in Derrida’s words) ‘nothing good to be hoped for’. The achievement of Macbeth is to expose the ‘mystery of iniquity’ (2 Thess. 2.7) that lies behind all terrorism.

Editorial

This special issue of Critical Survey has a twofold purpose: to mark the twentieth anniversary of the events of 11 September 2001, when Islamic terrorists piloted two planes into New York’s World Trade Centre, killing some three thousand innocent people; and to register some of the cultural changes that have taken place in the subsequent two decades, and can be directly or indirectly attributed to that world-changing day. The attacks of 9/11 soon came to represent an extensive typology of collisions: the ‘clash of civilisations’ between East and West; the unstable boundaries between war and peace in our contemporary world; and (to many, but not all academics) the destructive violence that potentially underlies Western values of liberty and peaceful co-existence. It has long been a commonplace that 9/11 profoundly and irreversibly changed our world. This issue sets out to represent and reflect some of those changes.

Urban Terrorism in the Arab World: Introducing a Dataset of Jihadist Attack Plots in Jordan

ABSTRACT Few regions have been more plagued by terrorism than the Arab world. However, knowledge of the phenomenon’s nature is limited by a lack of attack plot data for most Arab countries. This article contributes to addressing this gap by presenting a dataset of jihadist incidents in Jordan from 1994 until the end of 2018. Based on recent progress in measuring terrorism, the dataset does not only include launched attacks but also foiled and failed attack plots to give a more accurate and comprehensive overview of the threat. It provides answers to fundamental descriptive questions such as how many plots there have been, which jihadist actors have been responsible, and what type of attacks they have attempted to carry out. This work matters because it reveals the main characteristics of the jihadist terrorist threat to the Kingdom. This enables future studies to provide more empirically based explanations of what causes jihadist terrorism in Jordan than previously possible.

Historical Origins of European Islamophobia

This article is a rethinking of the modern trend in the Islamophobia scholarship, which frames European Islamophobia as a post-9/11 phenomenon. Though Islamist terrorism had a notoriety of raising anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments, the bigotry towards Islam, hatred against Muslims and prejudices about their cultural inferiority lurk deep in the history of European colonialism and the Holy Wars. This article suggests an assumption, that is, why Western scholars strive to coin 9/11 as the ‘starting point’ of Islamophobia. It also explains how demonization of Muslims during the Holy Wars and their dehumanization in the colonial period provided for the emergence of this phenomenon.

Self-managing terror: Resolving agency problems with diverse teams

I examine a principal-agents model of subversion with externalities to illustrate a novel mechanism for why diversity can be valuable to organizations: teams of diverse agents can self-manage and discourage their teammates from subversion through compromise. In contrast to standard “ally-principle” type results, I find that integrating more extreme agents can result in better-behaved teams. The model describes, among other cases, radical Islamist terror groups that use foreign fighters. Because foreign and domestic fighters have conflicting preferences over how they want to subvert, integrated teams may self-manage with efficiency gains for the principal. This model explains variation in agency problems and foreign fighter usage in major insurgent groups, including al Qaeda in Iraq, the Haqqani Network, and the Islamic State. Additionally, the theory here can explain management practices in a wide range of alternate settings, for example, where a busy or constrained principal cannot easily implement auditing or incentive contracts.

Факторы радикализации ислама в Индонезии в конце ХХ – начале XXI в.

In the late 1990s – early 2000s, in Indonesia, radical forms of Islam significantly spread what in some cases was reflected by the emergence of Islamist terrorist groups in various parts of the country. This phenomenon came as a surprise to the international community, which traditionally equated radical Islam with the Middle East issues. Nevertheless, a whole complex of reasons outlined in this article generated the development of radical Islam in Indonesia and its manifestation in the given format.

The Counterterrorism Conundrum: Understanding Terrorist Organizations, Ideological Warfare and Strategies for Counterintelligence-Based Counterterrorism

This red cell analysis illustrates through case studies the capacities and capabilities of the Islamic State (IS) terror organization at its peak, and the Haqqani Network over time as individual organizations, including their origins, ideology, leadership, organizational structures, and operational capabilities, to examine global terrorism with a focus on the ideological warfare challenges of combatting radical Islamic terrorism. These organizations’ connections to al Qaeda and the parts they play in the greater rising threat of global radical Islamic terrorism are established in order to frame global terrorism from a strategic historical standpoint to evaluate counterterrorism strategies for the future. The author presents strategy recommendations for the United States Intelligence Community (IC) and policy makers to effectively address the national and global security threats posed by transnational terrorism, using a combination of strategic counterintelligence and targeted ground operations, along with an original seven-principle approach to effective counterterrorism operations, as well as a broader strategy for targeting the ideological roots of radical Islamic terrorism.

Through the Extremist Lens: Uncovering the Correlation Between Domestic Right-Wing Extremist Ideology and Violence in the United States from 2000 to 2020

Domestic right-wing extremist violence has been increasing since 9/11/2001, outpacing federal recognition of the problem. Preoccupation with Islamic terrorism is only a partial explanation of this shortfall, institutional barriers and an increasingly mainstream political salience of domestic right-wing extremist ideology create serious obstacles to efforts at countering violent extremism. This study presents a clear relationship between domestic right-wing extremist ideology and violence in order to inform an effective counter violent extremism strategy. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze the expressed ideologies of domestic right-wing extremist attackers in the United States from 2000 to 2020 before comparing them to the number of deaths resulting from their attacks to reveal the correlation between ideology and the number of deaths. Qualitative data gathered from primary sources cited in news media archives vetted and referenced by the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) were theoretically coded to develop a set of aspects of domestic right-wing extremist ideology which were compared to quantitative data on the number of deaths gathered from the GTD. Comparison of aspects of ideology to the number of deaths showed that the ‘attacker justified violence’ aspect of ideology correlates significantly at a .05 degree of significance. Significant correlation between other aspects of ideology and the number of deaths, though prevalent, remain uncertain due to the small size of associated samples.

Crisis as Catalyst: Crisis in Conversion to Islam Related to Radicalism Intentions

ABSTRACT In Western democracies, Muslim converts are overrepresented in Islamist terrorism compared to born-and-raised Muslims. Consequently, researchers have begun to consider how the process of conversion to Islam might influence participation in terrorism, yet empirical data are lacking. To explore these connections, the present study measured the conversion experiences of Muslim converts, as well as their intentions to engage in radicalism. 177 U.S. Muslim converts completed the Radicalism Intentions Scale, which measures willingness to engage in violent and illegal political behaviors to support one’s group, and the Adult Religious Conversion Experience Questionnaire, which measures the components of conversion, including crisis. Crisis is an experience of stress or difficulty that contributes to the collapse of one’s pre-conversion belief system (e.g., when an alcoholic hits “bottom”). Results indicate that the level of crisis that converts experienced was the only conversion variable associated with converts’ radicalism intentions, which suggests that crisis may be an important construct in connecting the processes of conversion to Islam and participation in Islamist terrorism.