Jerome Drevon

Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies · Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding

The role of ideology in civil wars is particularly contentious, especially when it comes to Jihadi insurgents. Ideology is one of these groups’ defining characteristic, which questions what happens when Jihadis’ ideological commitments contradicts their strategic interests. This article explores these tensions with a particular focus on the issue o...

The Syrian regime unleashed unprecedented violence to suppress large-scale non-violent protests amid the Arab uprisings. Hundreds of armed groups formed throughout the country to defend the protesters and fight back. However, in contrast to other conflicts previously dominated by al-Qaeda and Islamic State, the two largest Syrian Jihadi groups, Ahr...

Institutionalizing Violence offers a detailed focus on the two most influential Egyptian jihadi groups—al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad. From the killing of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 to their partial association with al-Qaeda in the 1990s, the two groups illustrate the range of choices that jihadis make overtime including creat...

The globalization of jihad has proceeded in several stages from the mobilization against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s to Islamic State’s current campaign. The end of global jihad is nonetheless less understood, including the conditions in which jihadi groups could reject al-Qaeda (AQ) or Islamic State (IS). This article examines thi...

This article examines the presence of 605 armed groups in today's conflict environment by bringing new evidence based on internal research. It looks in particular at the way these non-State entities provide varying degrees of services to the population in the spaces that they control, and how this might impact the way a humanitarian organization li...

Most research on jihadi groups examines their violent radicalisation. Insurgents that politicise in civil wars and become more pragmatic without renouncing violence are less understood. This article defines jihadi groups' politicisation as the development of realistic tactical and strategic objectives, durable alliances with other actors including...

The Syrian Salafi armed group Ahrar al-Sham epitomises the most prominent case of politicisation. By 2014, Ahrar al-Sham was the leading insurgent group in Syria, with the largest number of soldiers, presence throughout Syrian opposition-held areas, and relatively strong ties with foreign countries including Turkey and Qatar. Ahrar al-Sham explicit...

The territories ruled by the Syrian opposition are being reorganised. The leaderless revolution has given way to a seizure of power by vanguardist and ideological organisations, be it the PYD in the northeast or HTS, the former local branch of AQ, in Idlib. However, these organisations cannot resist the regime’s military threat to reconquer the ter...

The territories ruled by the Syrian opposition are being reorganised. The leaderless revolution has given way to a seizure of power by vanguardist and ideological organisations, be it the PYD in the northeast or HTS, the former local branch of AQ, in Idlib. However, these organisations cannot resist the regime’s military threat to reconquer the ter...

In northwest Syria, HTS considers the consolidation of a technocratic government that preserves internal stability while fostering tacit Turkish and Western acceptance as key to its survival. Non-ideological governance is paradoxically the most appropriate choice for a group that stems from jihadi Salafism to emphasise its singularity, especially v...

This chapter argues that the 2011 Egyptian uprising and the 2013 military coup have destabilised the Egyptian Islamist SMF in contrasting ways. The liberalisation of the political process after 2011 stimulated the institutionalisation of loosely organised movements, challenged the organisational cohesion of established Islamist groups, and empowere...

This article analyses the evolution of the jihadi social movement (JSM) in changing environmental and factional circumstances. The author argues that internationalist groups like al-Qaida and Islamic State seek to become hegemonic in the JSM vis-à-vis nationally focused jihadis. Yet hegemony is associated with changing modes of organisation that ca...

This research analyses the comparative institutionalization of the strategies of three major components of the Egyptian Islamist social movement family: the jihadis, the Muslim Brotherhood and the salafis. It uses historical institutionalism to amend rational choice paradigms and to investigate the constraints and opportunities posed by these actor...

This article investigates the adoption of Salafi jihadism by young Egyptians and its repercussions on their mobilization in the Syrian jihad after 2011. This research demonstrates that Salafi jihadis mostly were raised in religious families and argues that the post-9/11 US-led wars triggered the exploration of an alternative to non-jihadi Salafism....

Following the overthrow of Husni Mubarak, al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya and members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad created two political parties. This article investigates these groups' organizational dynamics and internal dialogues in order to uncover the rationale of their political participation after the January 2011 uprising and its internal ideational le...

This chapter investigates the emergence and evolution of the Salafi radical milieu in Egypt. This is defined as the social structures composed of supporters and sympathisers of the militant groups, providing them with both logistic and moral support. This chapter establishes that the Egyptian Salafi radical milieu has been constructed in two succes...

Following the overthrow of Husni Mubarak, al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya and members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad created two political parties. This article investigates these groups’ organizational dynamics and internal dialogues in order to uncover the rationale of their political participation after the January 2011 uprising and its internal ideational le...

Interview with the eldest son of Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman, former head of the Egyptian Islamic Group (al-Jama'a al-Islamiya)

This article explores the contentious relation between the absence of democracy in the Middle East and the use of armed violence by Islamist groups in light of the Arab Spring. Its main objective is to decipher the evolving positions of former and current groups who used or promoted violence and to relate them to broader academic debates on violenc...