Violent Islamist Research Articles

The British state ‘security syndrome’ and Muslim diversity: challenges for liberal democracy in the age of terror

This paper explores the securitisation of British Muslims within a global context in which tensions are reignited by the threat that Islamist terrorism, and Islam more generally, are considered to pose to the West. While Western involvement in Muslim-majority countries continues to fuel the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’, domestic responses to terrorism and extremism take forward its rhetoric. At the heart of 15 years of wide-ranging responses lies the state ‘security syndrome’. Operating through the paradigm of risk reduction, the British state has reasserted its primary role as the distributor of security in ways that move beyond the surgical targeting of violent Islamists and their supporters and instead risk impacting on Muslims qua Muslims. Counter-terrorism and anti-extremism notions and practices that conflate security risks and cultural threats signal that Great Britain is a liberal democracy that is yet to fully foster positive inter-community relations and achieve social cohesion.

Islam’s Link to Terror—A Psychology of Denial

<p class="Body"><em>This positional paper examines mental health issues associated with terrorism, the psychological social and interpersonal dynamics of self-deception, delusion, and denial; and it offers analytical argument, sociological perspective, and comparative theologic analysis and commentary on the epistemology of Islam and radical Islamic terrorism. The disputatious assertion that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam is examined from an evidentiary criminal prima facie perspective. </em><em>Islam is </em><em>conceptually linked to various affiliate terrorist groups by its mutual sociology, derivative core ideology, and by its endogenous religious operational authority derived from the Koran. Islamic violence is not limited to terrorism. The feasibility of Islam embracing spiritual reformation is examined. Global terrorism needs to be fought both on the ground and with multifaceted societal strategies that challenge and defeat the ideologic presuppositional arguments that fuel terrorism. </em><em></em></p>

The Terrorist Age‐Crime Curve: An Analysis of American Islamist Terrorist Offenders and Age‐Specific Propensity for Participation in Violent and Nonviolent Incidents

ObjectiveThis study examines the age‐crime relationship among terrorist offenders.MethodThis study relies on a data set of over 600 American terrorism offenders inspired by one of three Islamist groups: Hamas, Hezbollah, or Al Qaeda.ResultsWe find that the pattern of violent Islamist crime in the United States departs from the standard age‐crime curve in significant ways. Violent action among terrorist offenders peaks at a later age and occurs across a broader age range than is the case for ordinary violent crimes.

The Second Arab Awakening: Revolution, Democracy, and the Islamist Challenge from Tunis to Damascus

The Second Arab Awakening: Revolution, Democracy, and the Islamist Challenge from Tunis to Damascus

Future (Im)Perfect? Mapping Conflict, Violence and Extremism in Africa

The central challenge for sub-Saharan Africa is to build accountable, capable governments that can deliver security and inclusive growth. Research into the drivers, trends and characteristics of violence in Africa may help achieve these goals. This paper firstly presents global and African trends in armed conflict since 1960, while looking at armed conflict within the broader context of political violence using recent event data. The fatality burden between key affected countries is also discussed. The paper then turns to an examination of the high levels of non-state conflict in the Middle East and Africa compared to the rest of the world and the systemic imbalances that drive instability. Finally, challenges in measuring the relative contribution of violent Islamist extremism to political violence are presented.

Grievances, governance and Islamist violence in sub-Saharan Africa

AbstractWhat explains the emergence of Islamist violence as a substantial security threat in such diverse contexts as Kenya, Mali and Nigeria? This article addresses this question through an exploration of the strategies of governance employed by states, and how these shape the emergence and mode of collective violence. Conflict research often emphasises the specificity of Islamist violence; but these conflicts can be understood as a form of political exclusion and grievance-based violence, comparable to other forms of political violence. Further, violent Islamist groups emerge fromlocalconditions: the areas in which groups are established share similarlocalexperiences of governance and political marginalisation; a history of violent conflict on which Islamist militants capitalise; and key triggering events expanding or reinforcing state exclusion. These findings challenge a narrative emphasising theglobal, interconnected nature of Islamist violence. This article pairs data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset (ACLED) with Afrobarometer survey data and case study evidence to identify drivers of Islamist violence across three African countries.

Menggagas Teologi Perdamaian Sunnî-Shî‘ah di Indonesia

<p>This article tries to analyze the phenomenon of Islamist violence in Indonesia due to the appeal between School of theology as was the case in Sampang, Madura. The conflict occurs because the Muslims can no longer recognize the differences between them, so that violence is a means of final settlement. Therefore, in this paper the author will try decoding problems between Sunni’s and Shiite’s School in Indonesia that I could find a way to peace. Because Sunni-Shi‘ite actually are brothers who were born on the basis of the spirit of keeping the truth and glorifying the Islam thoroughly in various parts of the world. In this way, Muslims should be able to put this difference as the good graces and blessings of life.</p>

Violent Islamist Extremism and Terror in Africa

This paper presents an overview of large-scale violence by Islamist extremists in key African countries. The paper builds on previous publications of the Institute for Security Studies on the nexus between development and conflict trends, and it seeks to provide an overview of the evolution of the associated terrorism through quantitative and contextual analysis using various large datasets. The focus is on the development and links among countries experiencing the worst of this phenomenon, especially Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Nigeria and Somalia, as well as the impact of events in the Middle East on these African countries.

The Case of Roshonara Choudhry: Implications for Theory on Online Radicalization, ISIS Women, and the Gendered Jihad

As dozens of British women and girls travel to join Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, there are increasing concerns over female radicalization online. These fears are heightened by the case of Roshonara Choudhry, the first and only British woman convicted of a violent Islamist attack. The university student in 2010 stabbed her Member of Parliament, after watching YouTube videos of the radical cleric Anwar Al Awlaki. Current radicalization theories portray Choudhry as a “pure lone wolf,” a victim of Internet indoctrination, without agency. This article explores how gender factors in her radicalization, to present an alternative to existing theoretical explanations. An engagement with gender reveals its role in Choudhry's radicalization, first, in precluding her from a real-world engagement with Islamism on her terms, pushing her to the Internet; then in increasing her susceptibility to online extremist messages; finally, in fomenting an eventually intolerable dissonance between her online and multiple “real” gendered identities, resulting in violence. The article emphasizes the transgressive nature of this act of female violence in Salafi-Jihadi ideology; also, the importance of this gendered ideology as the foundation of ISIS recruitment online. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the operation of gender in the Jihad's production of violence, and roles for men and women alike.

Explaining Support for Sectarian Terrorism in Pakistan: Piety, Maslak and Sharia

In the discourse around sectarian violence in Pakistan, two concerns are prominent. The first is the contention that piety, or the intensity of Muslim religious practice, predicts support for sectarian and other forms of Islamist violence. The second is the belief that personal preferences for some forms of sharia also explain such support. As I describe herein, scholars first articulated these concerns in the “clash of civilizations” thesis. Subsequent researchers developed them further in the scholarly and policy analytical literatures that explored these linkages through qualitative and quantitative methodologies. I revisit these claims in the particular context of sectarian violence in Pakistan. To do so, I use several questions included in a recent and large national survey of Pakistanis to create indices of both piety and support for three dimensions of sharia. I use these indices as explanatory variables, along with other explanatory and control variables, in a regression analysis of support for sectarian violence, the dependent variable. I find that the piety index and dimensions of sharia support are significant only when district fixed effects are excluded; however, personal characteristics (i.e., the particular school of Islam respondents espouse, ethnicity, several demographics) most consistently predict support for sectarian violence.

Foreign Fighters in Syria and Islamist Terror at Home: Determinants of Radical Islam in the OECD and Beyond

This paper examines the flow of foreign fighters to Syria and violence associated with extremist Islamism. Using both metrics as indicators of Islamist radicalism in a country, I analyze predictors of those metrics and discuss their policy implications. I find regional differences between the OECD members and nonmembers, and between countries with or without a large Muslim population (>40%). For mostly non-Muslim countries, there is a robust correlation between immigrants from the MENA region and the radical Islamist indicators. Members of the OECD appear to experience an insider/outsider dynamic, where the worse off immigrants are relative to natives of the host country, the higher these two indicators are. For all non-OECD countries, stronger civil liberties appear to decrease both foreign fighters and Islamist violence. Policies that increase civil liberties and improve immigrant integration may reduce a country’s foreign fighters in Syria and its incidences of Islamist violence at home — probably indicating a reduction in overall Islamist extremism within its borders.

Autocratic legacies and state management of Islamic activism in Niger

In contrast to similar organizations in its neighbouring countries, Niger's domestic Salafi associations have remained peaceful and apolitical. Drawing on historical institutionalist scholarship and on recent conceptualizations of the state as a religious actor, this article examines how the Nigerien state has tried to regulate religious practices since Seyni Kountché's military coup in 1974. It argues that the institutional regulation of religious practices is one important variable that accounts for Niger's deviant trajectory. During Niger's autocratic period (1974–91), the government established the Association islamique du Niger (AIN) as the sole legal authority regulating access to Niger's Friday prayer mosques. Committed to peaceful and apolitical interpretations of the Koran, the AIN confined access to Niger's religious sphere to local clerics and Sufi brotherhoods. After the breakdown of autocratic rule in 1991, the AIN served as a religious advisory body. Salafi associations could assemble freely but had to abide by certain criteria. Confronted with the prospect of Islamic violence in 2000, the Nigerien state intervened in Niger's religious sphere in several ways. Among other initiatives, the government began to resurrect a more rigorous system of religious supervision in order to monitor religious practices on an ongoing basis.

Clashing Nationalisms and Corrupting Co-Existence:

The Shahbag Protest and its aftermath, the rise of Hefajote Islam, signify the existence of competing ideological interests in the public sphere in Bangladesh. Rooted in the early 20th century Bengali-Hindu nationalist movement as well as in the identity politics that resulted in the Partition of the Subcontinent in 1947, the political polarization that gripped Bangladesh in 2013 has since divided the society. The Shahbag Protest, largely middle-class and urban in nature, was peaceful though it was demanding capital punishment against the war criminals. The proponents of the Shahbag Protest tried to evoke patriotic sentiment by emphasizing Bengaliness, a trait associated with the Bengali people, an “imagined community” created to legitimize the existence of Bangladesh. The violent Islamist rhetoric of the Hefajote Islam carried the insignia of the “Islamization” project. The discourse of global Islamism targets Muslimmajority countries in South Asia and SouthEast Asia as “these countries are not Islamic because their legal structures, norms, the predominant educational systems, popular cultures, etc., are manifestly un-Islamic” (Ahmad 3). In short, the cultural battle that emerged out of a legal demand for maximum punishment of the war criminals, who during the Liberation War of 1971, committed atrocities against their own people, is suggestive of the unresolved problem of nationalism in Bangladesh.

Sharia, Piety and Maslak: Support for Sectarian Violence in Pakistan

In the discourse around sectarian violence in Pakistan, two concerns are prominent. The first is the notion of piety or the intensity of Muslim religious practice as a potential predictor for sectarian and other forms of Islamist violence. The second is the belief that support for some forms of sharia predict this support. As I describe herein, these notions first manifested in the “clash of civilizations” thesis and developed further in the scholarly and policy analytical literatures that sought to explore these linkages through qualitative and quantitative methodologies. In this paper, I use dataset derived from a recent and large national survey of Pakistanis. I use various questions to create indices of both piety as well as support for three dimensions of Sharia, described herein. I use these indices as explanatory variables, along with other explanatory and control variables such as sectarian background, in my regression analysis of support for sectarian violence, my dependent variable. I find that the piety index is a positive predictor of support for sectarian terrorism. at low levels of statistical significance (p

Book Review: Media Framing of the Muslim World: Conflicts, Crises and Contexts, by Halim Rane, Jacqui Ewart, and John Martinkus

Media Framing of the Muslim World: Conflicts, Crises and Contexts. Halim Rane, Jacqui Ewart, and John Martinkus. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 216 pp. $28 pbk.The recent Islamist assassination of Charlie Hebdo staffmembers in Paris to avenge the honor of the Prophet Muhammad, whom the weekly satirizes frequently in cartoons, incited reprisals against mosques and other Islamic sites across France and stoked Islamophobia in social media, including a Facebook post from Australia that said, free world needs to wake up to the fact that we are at war with the Muslim religion. They are using our hospitality and free immigration to conduct this war under our noses. These predictable responses exhibit not only anger and frustration over relentless Islamist violence, but, according to Australian researchers Halim Rane (Griffith University), Jacqui Ewart (Griffith University), and John Martinkus (University of Tasmania), they also reflect Western news media reports that portray the Muslim world as a violent, fanatical, and misogynist enemy of Western freedom and civilization.The reports of Islamist atrocities from 9/11 on are, of course, true. Islamists have beheaded journalists, gunned down children in school, and massacred entire villages. But according to Rane, Ewart, and Martinkus, what gets lost in these stories is the fact thatan overwhelming majority of Muslims reject suicide bombing and other attacks against civilians; they regard such actions as unjustifiable even in the defense of Islam. The majority of Muslims also regard other acts of violence, such as honor killings, as never justified in Islam.The authors cite Gallup and Pew polls that show that most Muslims also uphold the religious freedom of non-Muslims, believe that Islamic law applies only to Muslims, and favor democracy over authoritarian rule. The episodic reporting of Islamist terrorism, however factual, creates the misimpression that extremists are the norm in Islam.One effect of this misimpression has been the obstruction of Muslims seeking asylum in the West from the danger and persecution in their home countries. The authors report that such hindrance takes place in Australia, which has discouraged Muslim asylum seekers by preventing boats carrying asylum seekers from landing on Australian shores, managing asylum requests in detention centers in Nauru and Papua New Guinea to restrict access to Australian legal processes, and detaining asylum seekers in substandard, remote facilities. As a result, Australia receives less than 3% of the world's applications for asylum. According to the authors, news reports seldom challenge politicians who pander to public anxiety by characterizing Muslim asylum seekers as illegals, boat people, and queue jumpers whose presence undermines traditional culture, drains the economy, and threatens national security. …

Religion and Conflict: Explaining the Puzzling Case of “Islamic Violence”

Despite considerable interest in the relationship between Islam and political violence, there is little systematic empirical research that explores the intrastate conflict proneness of Muslim countries, and existing studies provide mixed results. This article examines the causal factors that explain the prevalence of intrastate conflict in Muslim-plurality states and the conditions under which Islam may influence civil war onset. Further, following Ward, Greenhill, and Bakke’s (2010) suggestion, the effects of Islam and other socioeconomic and political factors in actually predicting civil wars are examined by utilizing ROC curves and cross-validation exercises. Utilizing the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s data for the 1981–2009 period, the findings indicate that Muslim-plurality countries are indeed disproportionately involved in intrastate conflicts, but these countries are also characterized by lower GDP per capita, oil dependency, state repression, autocracy, and youth bulges, all of which correlate strongly with intrastate conflict onset. The significance of Islam disappears when controls for such factors are included in the statistical model. The variable of Islam does not make any significant contribution to either the in-sample or out-of-sample predictive power of models. Among the factors that increase the risk of intrastate conflict, the presence of a youth bulge has the greatest impact in Muslim-plurality countries.

Underselling Islamist extremism in Sub-Saharan Africa

Islamist extremism as an ideology has seemingly spread in influence in the past few years. The violent Islamist threat may have a singular religious dogma, but that does not mean that it will interact in the same fashion within the various cultures it infests. The Sub-Saharan region is one general context where Islamist extremism is both vividly active and misunderstood. Africa's reaction to: Arabization; the adjustment to post-colonial rule; the perception of secular government institutions; the extent of cultural and religious pluralism; and the local character of Muslim leadership and institutions are all very different from that of the Middle East. Scores of terrorism analysts and even Arab populations only too familiar with the Middle East context superimpose Middle East threats over the Sub-Saharan African cultural landscape. Instead of generalizing the Islamist threats, it might be better to ask why it is that violent Islamist groups have traditionally been challenged to expand their influence in Muslim Sub-Saharan Africa. The underestimated Islamist is using ignorance to its advantage, recruiting through channels unnoticed by its Arab counterparts while creatively catering its message by region.

Cultural and religious demography and violent Islamist groups in Africa

This research explores the relationship between cultural demography and Islamist violence in Africa in a cross-national time series study. It argues that while religious demography can explain some aspects of Islamist violence, these explanations have to date been privileged over analyses which take into account the way institutional and political relations of the state incentivize and de-incentivize the salience of particular identities in collective action. This paper uses disaggregated conflict event data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset (ACLED) to test the relationships between religious group size, diversity, ethnicity and Islamist violence. The results highlight that approaches to explaining Islamist violence emphasising the cultural specificity of Islam as particularly prone to violence, and those focusing on competition between diverse identity groups as explanations for the rise of Islamist violence are misguided. Rather, ethnic political power relations emerge as important interacting factors in religious identity conflict, with Islamist violence as an example. The article makes an original contribution both empirically, by testing existing theories of Islamist violence on previously unanalysed data; and theoretically, by highlighting the importance of political marginalisation and strategic identity construction as explanations for violent Islamist activity.

Madaaris in Pakistan: Producing Better Educated Students Who are More Socially Intolerant and Inclined to Support Islamist Violence?

Pakistan's madaaris sustain attention for their suspected contribution to militancy. Some scholars reject this securitized discourse, arguing that it mobilizes/sustains various fictions that madaaris: are schools last resort for the poor; provide little value; expanding in their usage; and spawning international terrorists. I employ four new data-sources to inform debates between those who understand seminaries from the optic of security and those who do not. I find: madrasah use is neither expanding nor due to poverty; parents use them to complement other forms of education, reflecting parental preferences for religious and secular educations; madaaris provide educational benefit beyond public schools.

Al-Muhajiroun in the United Kingdom: the role of international non-recognition in heightened radicalization dynamics

This article aims at uncovering the dynamics between non-recognition – real or perceived – and increasingly violent practices, with a case study focusing on the representations of the violent radical Islamist group Al-Muhajiroun following the 9/11 attacks and the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan in 2001. The article argues that these two events were considered salient by the group in terms of both ‘Muslims’ social value and self-esteem and were presented, on behalf of the Ummah, as instances of non-recognition. From this interpretation, the group’s discourse became increasingly political, structured and violence-endorsing. The article concludes by showing that Al-Muhajiroun’s distorted claims for recognition translated into policy prescriptions advocating an all-out Jihad to try and establish a world caliphate as an alternative, superior hegemony.