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Jihad as a Complex Social Phenomenon
Abstract
This chapter analyzes jihad as a complex social phenomenon. It first discusses the relationship between terrorism and jihadism. It then introduces the reader to different narratives of jihad, especially the offensive and the defensive ones, with a focus on their textual basis and how they emanate from the different social contexts surrounding jihadism. The chapter also argues that after traditional jihad, associated with the authority of the Caliph, started to become increasingly irrelevant in many Muslim societies, new ways of relating to jihad were developed to deal with the local political realities: anti-colonial jihad; local jihad against the near enemy (al-‘adu al-qarib); classical jihad; and global jihad against the far enemy (al-‘adu al-ba’id). In Syria, however, jihad was also directed toward the internal enemy (al-‘adu al-dakhili) as IS increasingly focused its hostility on other Muslims who challenged the legitimacy of IS’s self-declared Caliphate.
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Hezbollah is a holistic network whose social, political, military and cultural dimensions are all parts of a discourse of resistance. Conducting a qualitative frame analysis of speeches by Hezbollah’s General Secretary Nasrallah, supported by interviews with Hezbollah leadership privy to its ideology, this study analyses the construction of muqawama (resistance). It argues that resistance is a complex social phenomenon, which can be manifested, for example, in the differences in how resistance is framed in varying contexts, often addressing different audiences. However, three unifying themes emerged from the frame analysis: diversity of resistance, normalisation of resistance and social dimensions of resistance.
Nyoppdagede primærkilder viser et skandinavisk innslag blant afghanaraberne i 1980-årene. Jihadismen i nord er antakelig eldre enn tidligere antatt.
The observation that groups unify in the face of common threats is long-standing. At the level of the nation-state, this is called the “rally-'round-the-flag” phenomenon. In the case of the United States, the rally phenomenon is measured as a surge of public approval for the president when the nation is involved in an international crisis.
Two hypotheses have been offered for why this surge of support occurs: (1) patriotism, as individuals respond to a threat by identifying with an in-group, in this case the nation and its president; and (2) opinion leadership, as the information environment changes because opposition leaders fall silent or support the president during a crisis and a portion of the public follows those elite partisan cues.
Through three waves of scholarship, empirical evidence has cumulated about whether, when, why, and how much people rally in response to international crises (although much of the evidence is based on dynamics within the United States). The public’s reaction to a crisis is not automatic; sometimes public approval for the president goes up; other times the president’s approval ratings go down. A positive rally effect is associated with a variety of conditions, such as how prominently the event is reported, whether the White House actively frames the issue, the amount of criticism from opposition elites, and whether the country is at war or has recently concluded a war. The sizes of such rallies are variable, but on average, rallies in response to the deployment of force or international crises are small. Only wars (or other spectacular events like a large-scale terrorist attack) consistently provoke sizable rallies and these big events elicit an emotional reaction from citizens and a self-identification with the nation. Both hypotheses—patriotism and opinion leadership—are helpful in explaining why rallies occur and why they taper off over time.
The “diversionary theory of war” or the “diversionary use of force” is, for obvious reasons, a companion literature to the scholarship on rally effects. The logic is simple: if the public rallies around its leader in the face of external threats, then the possibility exists that politicians will intentionally create crises or deploy military forces or start wars to enhance their own political fortunes. Scholars have spent much effort trying to locate patterns of diversionary behavior by American presidents and other world leaders with inconsistent and inconclusive results.
But the cumulative findings from the rally-'round-the-flag scholarship show that leaders can’t expect much of a public rally from any but the most spectacular of international crises, such as full-scale war. These findings from the rally literature help to explain the lack of consistent empirical support for diversionary theory.
The authors hadn't intended to put themselves in danger but that's what happened as they interviewed an unprecedented thirty-two battle-hardened defectors about the gritty details of life inside ISIS. With unparalleled breadth, depth and access, ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate offers a compelling view of ISIS from men, women and teens now in hiding, having escaped the most brutal terrorist group in recent history. They were fighters and commanders, wives of fighters-living and dead, female enforcers, and Cubs of the Caliphate, including a child who volunteered and almost got sent as a suicide bomber at age thirteen. They discuss motivations for joining and defecting, and delve into news-making topics: coercing children to become suicide bombers; brides of ISIS and the brutal female morality police; Yazidi and Sunni sex slaves held in massive compounds where fighters use them at will; privilege bestowed on foreign fighters; prisoners kept for the sole purpose of beheading by new inductees. The defectors shared a startling array of photos and videos from personal cell phones and many are included in the digital version of this book. An unexpected subplot unfolded when Dr. Yayla found himself tailed by ISIS, and Dr. Speckhard barely missed two suicide attacks. But the authors are not deterred. As counter-terrorism experts with specialties in research psychology and law enforcement, they see ISIS as more than a terrorist group. ISIS is a brand that falsely sells dignity and purpose, justice and the restoration of glory-to vulnerable recruits-masterfully recruiting some 30,000 members online. It's the biggest influx of foreign fighters to a terrorist haven in history. Using the defectors own words, the authors intend to break the ISIS brand. They have videotaped these interviews to edit them into short clips, memes and tweets for an online counter-offensive. Speckhard and Yayla state that disillusioned ISIS defectors are the most influential tool for countering ISIS propaganda. The persuasive voices of these defectors and the resulting videos will soon invade ISIS chat rooms where their propaganda thrives. With over one thousand active investigations in the U.S. across all 50 states, discrediting ISIS ideology is essential to stopping it.
Terrorist studies rarely discuss activities before the invention of dynamite, which made modern terror possible. One important, interesting, and forgotten form is the mob terror campaign. Two significant successful American examples are examined and compared, “The Sons of Liberty” which ignited the American Revolution, and the Ku Klux Klan, which “won the peace” the South wanted after it lost the Civil War. The study concludes by briefly comparing modern with mob terror.
Lygre, R. B., Eid, J., Larsson, G. & Ranstorp, M. (2011). Terrorism as a process: A critical review of Moghaddam’s “Staircase to Terrorism”. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 52, 609–616.
This study reviews empirical evidence for Moghaddam’s model “Staircase to Terrorism,” which portrays terrorism as a process of six consecutive steps culminating in terrorism. An extensive literature search, where 2,564 publications on terrorism were screened, resulted in 38 articles which were subject to further analysis. The results showed that while most of the theories and processes linked to Moghaddam’s model are supported by empirical evidence, the proposed transitions between the different steps are not. These results may question the validity of a linear stepwise model and may suggest that a combination of mechanisms/factors could combine in different ways to produce terrorism.
2 experiments were conducted to test the proposition that once someone has agreed to a small request he is more likely to comply with a larger request. Exp. I demonstrated this effect when the same person made both requests; Exp. II extended this to the situation in which different people made the 2 requests. Several experimental groups were run in an effort to explain these results, and possible explanations are discussed.
To foster a more in-depth understanding of the psychological processes leading to terrorism, the author conceptualizes the terrorist act as the final step on a narrowing staircase. Although the vast majority of people, even when feeling deprived and unfairly treated, remain on the ground floor, some individuals climb up and are eventually recruited into terrorist organizations. These individuals believe they have no effective voice in society, are encouraged by leaders to displace aggression onto out-groups, and become socialized to see terrorist organizations as legitimate and out-group members as evil. The current policy of focusing on individuals already at the top of the staircase brings only short-term gains. The best long-term policy against terrorism is prevention, which is made possible by nourishing contextualized democracy on the ground floor.
Jihad is the most organized force against Western capitalism since the Soviet era. Yet jihadism is multifaceted and complex, much broader than Al Qaeda alone. In the first wide-ranging introduction to today's rapidly growing jihadism, Khosrokhavar explains how two key movements variously influence jihadi activists. One, based in the Middle East, is more heavily influenced by Islamic religion and political thought. The other, composed of individuals growing up or living mostly in Europe and Western democracies including the United States, is motivated by secular as well as religious influences. Khosrokhavar interprets religious and lesser-known Arabic texts and the real-world economic and political dynamics that make jihadism a growing threat to Western democracies. Interviews with imprisoned jihadists on what motivated their plots and actions help the readers understand reality as seen by jihadists. The author concludes with recommendations to safeguard democracies from future jihadism.
Since 9/11 we have been told that terrorists are pathological evildoers, beyond our comprehension. Before the 1970s, however, hijackings, assassinations, and other acts we now call ‘terrorism’ were considered the work of rational strategic actors. ‘Disciplining Terror’ examines how political violence became ‘terrorism,’ and how this transformation ultimately led to the current ‘war on terror.’ Drawing upon archival research and interviews with terrorism experts, Lisa Stampnitzky traces the political and academic struggles through which experts made terrorism, and terrorism madeexperts. She argues that the expert discourse on terrorism operates at the boundary – itself increasingly contested – between science and politics, and between academic expertise and the state. Despite terrorism now being central to contemporary political discourse, there have been few empirical studies of terrorism experts. This book investigates how the concept of terrorism has been developed and used over recent decades.
https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/sociology/political-sociology/disciplining-terror-how-experts-invented-terrorism?format=PB
Fawaz Gerges’ book on al Qaeda and the jihadist movement has become a classic in the field since it was published in 2005. In the intervening years, with the advance of the ‘War on Terror’ and the invasion of Iraq, much has changed and, just as Gerges showed, al Qaeda’s fortunes have taken a significant downturn. Revisiting The Far Enemy in this new edition, Gerges demonstrates that not only have the jihadists split ranks, but that voices from within the ultra-religious right, those that previously supported al Qaeda, are condemning its tactics as violent, unethical, and out of accord with the true meaning of jihad. In fact, millions of Muslims worldwide have rejected al-Qaeda’s ideology and strategies and blame Osama bin Laden and his cohorts for the havoc the organisation has wreaked on their communities. Al-Qaeda is now in the wilderness suffering massive erosion of authority and legitimacy in Muslim eyes and facing a fierce revolt from within. As Gerges warns, the next US administration would do well to use political and socio-economic strategies rather than military means to ensure that it stays there.
Organizational Identity presents the classic works on organizational identity alongside more current thinking on the issues. Ranging from theoretical contributions to empirical studies, the readings in this volume address the key issues of organizational identity, and show how these issues have developed through contributions from such diverse fields of study as sociology, psychology, management studies and cultural studies. The readings examine questions such as how organizations understand who they are, why organizations develop a sense of identity and belonging where the boundaries of identity lie and the implications of postmodern and critical theories' challenges to the concept of identity as deeply-rooted and authentic. Includes work by: Stuart Albert, Mats Alvesson, Blake E. Ashforth, Marilynn B. Brewer, George Cheney, Lars Thoger Christensen, C.H. Cooley, Kevin G. Corley, Barbara Czarniawska, Janet M. Dukerich, Jane E. Dutton, Kimberly D. Elsbach, Wendi Gardner, Linda E. Ginzela, Dennis A. Gioia, E. Goffman, Karen Golden-Biddle, Mary Jo Hatch, Roderick M. Kramer, Fred Rael, G.H. Mead, Michael G. Pratt, Anat Rafaeli, Hayagreeva Rao, Majken Schultz, Howard S. Schwartz, Robert I. Sutton, Henri Taijfel, John Turner, David A. Wherren, and Hugh Willmott. Intended to provide easy access to this material for students of organizational identity, it will also be of interest more broadly to students of business, sociology and psychology.
Why has transnational war volunteering increased so dramatically in the Muslim world since 1980? Standard explanations, which emphasize U.S.-Saudi support for the 1980s Afghan mujahideen, the growth of Islamism, or the spread of Wahhabism are insufficient. The increase in transnational war volunteering is better explained as the product of a pan-Islamic identity movement that grew strong in the 1970s Arab world from elite competition among exiled Islamists in international Islamic organizations and Muslim regimes. Seeking political relevance and increased budgets, Hijaz-based international activists propagated an alarmist discourse about external threats to the Muslim nation and established a global network of Islamic charities. This soft pan-Islamic discourse and network enabled Arabs invested in the 1980s Afghanistan war to recruit fighters in the name of inter-Muslim solidarity. The Arab-Afghan mobilization in turn produced a foreign fighter movement that still exists today, as a phenomenon partly distinct from al-Qaida. The analysis relies on a new data set on foreign fighter mobilizations, rare sources in Arabic, and interviews with former activists.
A Weld study investigated cross-cultural diVerences in choice-congruent behavior and its impact on compliance. U.S. and Asian partic-ipants received a request to complete an online survey and a month later they were approached with a larger, related request. Compliance with the initial request had a stronger impact on subsequent compliance among the U.S. participants than among the Asian participants. Despite their lower rate of compliance with the initial request, the U.S. participants who chose to comply were more likely than their Asian counterparts to agree to the subsequent request. Further analyses revealed that this eVect was driven by diVerences in the individu-alistic/collectivistic orientation of the participants from the two cultures. Within both cultures, the more individualistic participants showed stronger consistency with their earlier compliance than the more collectivistically oriented participants.
For decades, a new type of terrorism has been quietly gathering ranks in the world. America's ability to remain oblivious to these new movements ended on September 11, 2001. The Islamist fanatics in the global Salafi jihad (the violent, revivalist social movement of which al Qaeda is a part) target the West, but their operations mercilessly slaughter thousands of people of all races and religions throughout the world. Marc Sageman challenges conventional wisdom about terrorism, observing that the key to mounting an effective defense against future attacks is a thorough understanding of the networks that allow these new terrorists to proliferate. Based on intensive study of biographical data on 172 participants in the jihad, Understanding Terror Networks gives us the first social explanation of the global wave of activity. Sageman traces its roots in Egypt, gestation in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war, exile in the Sudan, and growth of branches worldwide, including detailed accounts of life within the Hamburg and Montreal cells that planned attacks on the United States. U.S. government strategies to combat the jihad are based on the traditional reasons an individual was thought to turn to terrorism: poverty, trauma, madness, and ignorance. Sageman refutes all these notions, showing that, for the vast majority of the mujahedin, social bonds predated ideological commitment, and it was these social networks that inspired alienated young Muslims to join the jihad. These men, isolated from the rest of society, were transformed into fanatics yearning for martyrdom and eager to kill. The tight bonds of family and friendship, paradoxically enhanced by the tenuous links between the cell groups (making it difficult for authorities to trace connections), contributed to the jihad movement's flexibility and longevity. And although Sageman's systematic analysis highlights the crucial role the networks played in the terrorists' success, he states unequivocally that the level of commitment and choice to embrace violence were entirely their own. Understanding Terror Networks combines Sageman's scrutiny of sources, personal acquaintance with Islamic fundamentalists, deep appreciation of history, and effective application of network theory, modeling, and forensic psychology. Sageman's unique research allows him to go beyond available academic studies, which are light on facts, and journalistic narratives, which are devoid of theory. The result is a profound contribution to our understanding of the perpetrators of 9/11 that has practical implications for the war on terror. Copyright
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