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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
From Paris to San Bernardino, Barcelona to Manchester, home-grown terrorism is among the most urgent challenges confronting Western nations. Attempts to understand jihadism have typically treated it as a form of political violence or religious conflict. However, the closer we get to the actual people involved in radicalization, the more problematic these explanations become. In this fascinating book, Kevin McDonald shows that the term radicalization unifies what are in fact very different experiences. These new violent actors, whether they travelled to Syria or killed at home, range from former drug dealers and gang members to students and professionals, mothers with young children and schoolgirls. This innovative book sets out to explore radicalization not as something done to people but as something produced by active participants, attempting to make sense of themselves and their world. In doing so, McDonald offers powerful portraits of the immersive worlds of social media so fundamental to present-day radicalization. Radicalization offers a bold new way of understanding the contemporary allure of jihad and, in the process, important directions in responding to it.
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Seitenzahl: 414
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Dedication
Copyright
Acknowledgements
1 Rethinking Radicalization
Violence, emergency, uncertainty
Political violence?
Religious violence?
Radicalization, vulnerability and identity?
This book
Social media: affect and embodied imagination
Radicalization pathways
2 Distant Suffering
The fam and everybody
How I’m feeling, atm
Mujahideen swag, yes pls
Pleasure and humour
The encounter with suffering
This relates to me
The life of a stranger
I’ve got myself a new CLIQUEE
LOL
From good and evil to innocent and guilty
What you aren’t being told
Desire and repulsion, beauty and ugliness
Disgust
Cleanse this impure nation
Purity versus impurity
Trolling
Filth
The grotesque
True Muslims, false Muslims
Distant suffering
Choons, eyebrows and hijabs
I hate Shias
Innocence? Makes me laugh
The Khalifah: to save ourselves
Power
A transformation
3 DIY Religion: Hidden Worlds, from Fear to Bliss
The answer to every question
19 HH
Collective identity?
If you love someone, you’re going to say it
It takes my breath away
Shirk, power and fear
Mediated memories
Sisters
Between the uncanny and bliss
4 Mediating Violence: Filming the Self
Being in the world
Ecstatic violence
I die like Jesus Christ
Violence reveals a truth
Film directors will be fighting over this story
Fan cultures
Fan cultures and desire: #Freejahar
Alone against the enemy
Fan cultures and disgust: Ewwwwwww your brave to hold it!
The fake jihad life
Shit man!
Fusion and unreality
Mediation, individuation
5 From Drug Dealer to Jihadist
You realize you’re going nowhere
The tourist terrorist
Brothers
Soldiers
6 The Gamification of Jihad: the Cyber Caliphate
Gamification
Games and religion
One of the most hated hackers on this game
Beyond the game
Conspiracy, trust and distinction
Hacktivism, script kiddies and elephant worshippers
Knowledge is power: revealing truth, revealing guilt
PoisAnon and crisis
@Pu55yGa110r3
Departure
Cyberjihad
7 My Concern is Me
What’s in a name?
I feel the pain
Now you feel how it is
The filthy ways of the West
We look for all those dirty elements
Power and the mask
The ‘other’ is the self
Order and chaos
My eyes are filled with tears
A structure of feeling
Life sucked
You will never be anybody!
8 Radicalization: Experience, Embodiment and Imagination
The vulnerability paradigm
Strangeness and the uncanny
Purity and impurity, desire and repulsion
A sociology of experience
Focus on ‘I’
Suicide by murder
Criminal pathways
Focus on ‘you’
Radicalization as ‘us’
Pathways, affect and imagination
Radicalization, politics and religion
Implications for prevention and disengagement
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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For Lorna
Radicalization
Kevin McDonald
polity
Copyright © Kevin McDonald 2018
The right of Kevin McDonald to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2264-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: McDonald, Kevin, 1955- author.Title: Radicalization / Kevin McDonald.Description: Cambridge, UK : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018002843 (print) | LCCN 2018018244 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509522644 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509522606 | ISBN 9781509522606 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509522613(pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Radicalism--Religious aspects--Islam. | Radicalization. | Islamic fundamentalism. | Terrorism--Religious aspects--Islam. | Jihad. | Internet and terrorism. | Social media.Classification: LCC HN49.R33 (ebook) | LCC HN49.R33 M432 2018 (print) | DDC 303.48/4--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002843
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
While a book may be written by an individual, it almost always involves the contribution of many people. This is definitely the case with this one. Sections are based on fieldwork with ‘hard to reach’ groups, in some cases members of proscribed organizations or supporters of jihadism, demanding extensive periods of fieldwork and relationship building. Here my co-worker Mohammad Ilyas has been critical in nurturing relationships over several years, building on earlier work made possible by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and a European Union Marie Curie International Fellowship. Opportunities to explore ideas and make sense of often confusing material were fundamental to the book’s construction, and here the generosity of others has been critical. Colleagues and students in the Department of Criminology and Sociology at Middlesex University in London provided invaluable opportunities to explore ideas, and it would not have been possible to complete this book without the support of my Dean, Joshua Castellino. I have been able to explore key themes at the Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where readers will note my debt to Farhad Khosrokhavar, François Dubet, Michel Wieviorka and Alain Touraine. Research Committee 47 of the International Sociological Association, led by Geoffrey Pleyers, afforded me opportunities to make sense of material at critical points. Others have also engaged in generous dialogue, from colleagues at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and Aarhus University in Denmark, to practitioners involved in the EU Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) and the European Expert Network on Terrorism Issues (EENeT). I have greatly benefited from advice about ethical issues, in particular that of my colleagues Sarah Bradshaw and Philip Leach at Middlesex University. David Anderson QC, at the time the United Kingdom’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, generously responded to ethical as well as legal questions posed by the research this book is based on. The book itself owes a great debt to the generous feedback of anonymous reviewers at Polity, and to the patient but demanding engagement of Jonathan Skerrett. Despite all this, it goes without saying that I alone am responsible for the judgements, arguments and conclusions presented in the chapters that follow.
The research upon which this book is based, whether interviewing or analysing social media material, has at times been difficult not only intellectually but personally. While sociological work can sometimes celebrate life-affirming experiences, this is not the case in this book. Undertaking this research has underlined just how much our human vulnerability and incompleteness is not a problem to be overcome but the very basis of living with others. Throughout this period, I have relied on the presence of many people constantly affirming the complexities and wonder of life – above all Lorna, to whom this book is dedicated.
1Rethinking Radicalization
In 2012, Aqsa Mahmood was an 18-year-old living with her parents in a middle-class suburb of Glasgow, Scotland. She had completed secondary school and was making plans for the university course she would begin in the autumn. Like many young people in Europe and North America, much of her social life with her friends took place through social media. She created her first Twitter account in 2010, tweeting approximately thirty times a day, most exchanges being with a close group of friends, her ‘fam’. In 2012, she created her first ask.fm account, and in it we encounter the kind of communications we would expect of an 18-year-old: chatting about her former school, her suburb, expressing pleasure at receiving compliments. She is integrated into her community; she shares opinions about local cricket teams, and her pride in the kilt that was part of her school uniform, declaring ‘I’m a true Scot’ (ask.fm, 13 August 2012). In November, she is tweeting pictures of steamy male film stars to her girlfriends, and screenshots of her mum’s attempts to get her to pick up the phone when she calls (Twitter, 27 November 2012).
Just one year later, Aqsa Mahmood left her home in Glasgow to travel to Aleppo in Syria, where she became part of what was then known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham, or ISIS. There she took on an active role offering advice and strategies to other young women in the United Kingdom about how to travel successfully to Syria. On 28 September 2015, less than two years after her departure, she was deemed of sufficient importance to be added to the list of individuals subject to United Nations Security Council sanctions, named as an individual actively involved in promoting al-Qaeda-linked terrorism. This book sets out to understand how such a transformation, and others like it, is possible.
Violence, emergency, uncertainty
Aqsa Mahmood is only one of more than five thousand people estimated to have travelled from the industrialized democracies of Europe, North America and the Pacific to join jihadist groups in Syria during the period 2012 to 2017 (Europol 2017). This number reached a peak in 2016, and then began to decline as western governments made travel to Syria more difficult, and as the Islamic State began to suffer defeats and loss of territory, ultimately leading to the loss of Raqqa, its capital in Northern Syria, in October 2017. Like the majority of people who travelled to Syria during this time, Mahmood was young, the average age of those making this journey being under 25 (Europol 2017). This is very different from the age profile of those who a generation earlier travelled to join in the Afghan and Balkan wars, where the age of the majority who made this journey was over thirty. And Mahmood is not only young, but a woman, again reflecting a major transformation from two decades earlier, where those who travelled to Afghanistan were almost uniquely men.
During this period, a new potential for violence was not only evident in the numbers of people travelling to Syria. Attacks occurred across Europe, from driving vehicles into crowds and stabbings to the organized attacks in Paris in November 2015, which killed 150 and injured hundreds. Several months later there was an attack at Brussels Airport and then one on France’s Bastille Day when a refrigerated lorry ran into crowds in the Riviera city of Nice, killing 86 and injuring more than four hundred. In the United Kingdom, attacks had also taken place, including a college student of Libyan origin who blew himself up with a shrapnel-filled bomb at a concert in Manchester, killing 22 people, mainly teenage girls and children. Such violence has not been confined to Europe. In the United States in 2009, a shooter killed 13 people at the Fort Worth military base and wounded a further twenty-nine. In December 2015, 14 people were killed in a shooting in San Bernadino and, in June 2016, 49 people were killed and a further 53 wounded at an LGTB nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where the killer claimed allegiance to the Islamic State. At that time, this was the largest mass killing in modern American history, and it remains the largest killing of LGTB people since the Nazi Holocaust. In September 2016, three bombs exploded in the New York City area, wounding some thirty people and, a year later in October, a 29-year-old man drove a truck down a bicycle path in Manhattan, hitting cyclists, pedestrians and a school bus, killing eight people and wounding many more. Similar radicalized violence has also emerged in Canada and Australia, including attacks with vehicles, shootings, attempted use of explosives and stabbings of police.
It is important to recognize that the scale of this violence is dwarfed by violence taking place in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia or Libya. But these countries are all experiencing modern forms of warfare involving collapsed or compromised states, where regular military forces merge with militias, criminal groups, families and individuals, and where once clearly defined fields of battle have given way to pervasive and increasingly chaotic violence (McDonald 2013). This is not the case in Europe, North America or the industrialized countries of the Pacific.
What is striking across all these actions is the diversity of those involved. Many are very young, such as the 15-year-old schoolboy without any background of violence who, in October 2015, shot and killed a police employee in Sydney, Australia, or three schoolgirls from London who travelled to Syria in that same year. Others have backgrounds ranging from drug dealers and gang members to students and professionals or mothers with young children. This diversity has been the source of a new kind of uncertainty, a sense of disorientation and insecurity, the sense that we are living in a world that is less and less intelligible, and so less secure.
Political violence?
Interviewe
r:
What is jihad?
Al-Mazwagi
:
Jihad is ah …, ah jihad means to ah … what’s the word I’m looking for?
Interviewer
:
Struggle?
Al-Mazwagi
:
No, no, no, not struggle … But to kick some butt![
giggles
] Jihad is to kick Obama’s … [
laughs, then pauses
]. What’s that word? There’s a word [
longer pause
] Yeah, ok, jihad is to spend all your time and effort in fighting the enemies of Allah SWT’. (Ibrahim al-Mazwagi, North Syria, January 2013 (Channel 4, United Kingdom)
Ibrahim al-Mazwagi, aged 21, was the first British fighter to be killed in the Syrian civil war in February 2013. A university graduate who grew up in London, he had travelled to Syria a year earlier and joined the Katiba al Muhajireen, a brigade of foreign fighters that would eventually become part of the Islamic State. In the exchange above, he is searching to find the words to answer ‘What is jihad?’. To help out, the interviewer suggests ‘struggle’. Al-Mazwagi rejects this, and continues searching for a word that eludes him. Suddenly his eyes light up and he smiles; he’s found what he’s looking for: kick some butt. Laughing with relief and pleasure, he adds that it is Obama’s butt to be kicked. He then pauses for several seconds, becomes more serious and offers another answer, this time with much less inflection or expression. It is as if he is repeating something that he has learnt by heart. Later in the same exchange, the interviewer asks him why he has come to Syria. Al-Mazwagi responds: ‘Well, I’ve always known about jihad, seen the Mujahideen on TV and everything.’
This brief exchange opens up questions that will be central to this book. Al-Mazwagi offers what amounts to two accounts of what jihad means. His first answer is to ‘kick some butt’ which he refines as ‘Obama’s butt’. In this short phrase, al-Mazwagi summarizes one of the major approaches to jihadism within the social sciences today: jihad is political violence. He expresses a widely held view of the motivations behind jihadist violence, often associated with liberal or progressive observers. From this perspective, jihadist violence is a response to external events or actors. This kind of analysis is associated with influential scholars, such as the linguist and commentator on American foreign policy Noam Chomsky, who argues that terrorism needs to be fundamentally understood as a response to United States’ actions. For Chomsky, the appeal of terrorism is ‘primarily among young people who live under conditions of repression and humiliation, with little hope and little opportunity, and who seek some goal in life that offers dignity and self-realization; in this case, establishing a utopian Islamic state rising in opposition to centuries of subjugation and destruction by Western imperial power’ (Polychroniou and Chomsky 2015). This is a view widely defended by violent actors themselves. Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both converts to Islam, murdered and then attempted to behead Lee Rigby, an off-duty soldier, as he was crossing a street in London in 2013. Adebolajo asserted to a passer-by who filmed him: ‘The only reason we killed this man … is because Muslims are dying daily… . This British solider is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’
This ‘political violence’ paradigm is arguably most influential in the sub-discipline of terrorism studies that developed in the 1970s, focusing on the militarized groups that emerged following the collapse of the western student movement, such as the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weather Underground in the United States, the Red Army Faction in Germany and more short-lived groups such as the Angry Brigade in the United Kingdom or Action Directe in France (McDonald 2013). In the years since, similarly configured separatist groups have remained a source of violence in Europe, from Corsica to Northern Ireland (Europol 2017). In such cases, violence has been structured by ideology, organization and criminality, framed by what appeared as one of the core beliefs of terrorism studies in the 1980s: ‘terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead’ (Jenkins 1975: 16).
Today’s violence in North America, Europe and the industrialized countries of the Pacific takes on a very different profile. Organized and structured groups have given way to groups of friends, networks or individuals, often linked through social media. And rather than made up primarily of former university students, the new violent actors are much more diverse, with an increasing presence of people with criminal backgrounds. Those who joined violent groups in the 1970s almost always had a previous background in ‘high risk’ activism, often involving confrontations with police, so much so that influential approaches argued that terrorist violence was a product of competitive escalation between police and protesters (Della Porta 2013: 76). But today’s situation is radically different. Rather than a long and increasingly frustrated period of activism, leading eventually to embracing violence, the great majority of today’s violent actors in Europe and North America have no experience in solidarity organizations or political activism of any kind. And increasing numbers embrace jihadist violence not with a background in activism, but from involvement in criminality.
Religious violence?
In [my local] mosque there is not one person with the same mentality as me. I did not learn my jihad from the Aberdeen mosque, I learned it through my own on the Internet or whatever.
In the mid-1990s, international relations scholars such as Samuel Huntington began to argue that, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the older political opposition between capitalism and communism that had dominated much of the twentieth century was giving way to what he saw as a ‘clash of civilizations’. Central to this was what he saw as an emerging opposition between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ (Huntington 1996). From this perspective, after the collapse of communism it would be religion, rather than politics, that would be the source of major world conflicts. Influential sociologists such as Anthony Giddens argued that the pace of globalization had become so great that many people were unable to cope with a world they increasingly experienced as ‘out of control’ (1999: 2). Evoking a kind of ‘strain theory’, Giddens argued that in this world, religion was becoming one of the most important sources of security and certainty, driving what he called the growth of ‘fundamentalism’. Other sociologists also used the term ‘fundamentalism’ to describe what they saw as a new potential for conflict and violence. The American Mark Juergensmeyer argued that religiously inspired social actors were less and less able to compromise with others, considering themselves to be the action of God in the world. Such new religious actors, he argued, were increasingly likely to see the world they were living in shaped by what he called a ‘cosmic war’ (Juergensmeyer 1996).
These views took on immense importance following the attacks of September 11 in 2001, not simply in academic debates, but in programmes seeking to respond to or prevent terrorist-inspired violence. In France, the political scientist Gilles Kepel argues that jihadist movements were a direct consequence of the development of Salafist religious movements in the Middle East (2015). He argues a form of radical Islam has been imported into Europe, and needs to be countered. This influential view has inspired programmes seeking to prevent radicalization through offering classes on the Qur’an and Islamic tradition. From this perspective, practices of religious piety become a source of suspicion.
This new concern with the violent potentials of religion reflects a more profound shift in the social sciences. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the social sciences largely accepted what had come to be known as the ‘secularization’ paradigm, believing that religion would become more personal and have less impact on public life and culture. But from the late twentieth century, confidence in the inevitability of secularization began to wane. Michael Walzer, one of the most important American public intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, captures this new concern when he argues:
I live with a generalized fear of every form of religious militancy. I am afraid of Hindutva zealots in India, messianic Zionists in Israel, and of rampaging Buddhist monks in Myanmar. But I admit that I am most afraid of Islamist zealots because the Islamic world at this moment in time (not always, not forever) is especially feverish and fervent… . politically engaged Islamist zealots can best be understood as today’s crusaders. (Walzer 2015)
There is a problem with this, however. The closer we get to the actual people involved in experiences of radicalization, the more problematic the idea of ‘religious zealots’ becomes. Abdul Raqib Amin, whom I quote in the introduction to this section, travelled from Aberdeen to Syria in 2014 and is typical of someone who constructs what he sees as a religious framework from sources he discovers on the internet. Like the overwhelming majority of these new violent actors, he demonstrates a ‘born-again’ profile, evident above all in the over-representation of converts involved in jihadist violence (current estimates suggest that 40 per cent of the Americans who travelled to Syria to join ISIS are converts). Very often, a selfdeclared embrace of Islam follows a largely secular lifestyle, in many cases associated with drug and alcohol use or delinquency. While often claiming a religious motivation, the majority lack any background of religious practice or history of involvement in mosques and, as a result, possess only a rudimentary knowledge of Islamic history or theology.
The lack of engagement with religious communities and the superficial knowledge of Islam demonstrated by those who become radicalized are pointed to by the French political sociologist Olivier Roy (2017). It is not Islam that leads to radicalization, he argues, but the opposite: angry and rebellious young people, no longer able to believe in political ideologies, construct an impoverished version of Islam to serve as a new ideology of protest and rupture. He insists that radicalization is best approached not as a religious movement but as a kind of youth movement, one where violence is not a means but becomes an end in itself. In particular, he argues, this movement has a generation dimension, where those who are radicalized claim that they are embracing the ‘true Islam’, while their parents’ beliefs remain mired in culture and tradition. The Islam of the young radicals, Roy argues, is a product of globalization: it is separated from tradition and history, disconnected from actual religious traditions and human communities, it is deterritorialized and deculturized (2014). While it claims to reject globalized modernity, he insists, jihadist radicalization is in fact one of its products. Jihadists’ knowledge and interest in the Qur’an is about as deep, Roy argues, as the knowledge of Marxism shared by the young Red Guards unleashed during China’s Cultural Revolution, whose ideology consisted of a collection of slogans from Mao’s Little Red Book. Jihadists, argues Roy, are not religious fundamentalists who turn to violence; rather, they are violent nihilists, people without beliefs or utopias, who embrace an impoverished version of Islam (2017).
From this perspective, the paradigmatic case of jihadist radicalization is the violent criminal who embraces Islam, and who then travels to Syria to continue to enjoy a life of violence and crime. This argument certainly alerts us to the limits of the argument that sees radicalization as an extension of religious fundamentalism. But the problem with Roy’s argument is that once we get closer to those who have embraced jihadism, many simply do not correspond to his account of violent nihilists, for whom violence is an end in itself. Aqsa Mahmood, who abandoned her university course in pharmacy to travel to Syria, was not a violent nihilist. Junaid Hussain, who left Britain in June 2015 to travel to Syria, was a computer hacker and gamer who in the months before his departure was wearing an Anonymous mask. His partner Sally Jones had been a digital artist promoting her works on an esoteric website and in 2012 she had been posting against all forms of organized religion, which she saw as leading inevitably to violence.
If those who embrace jihadism cannot be understood as ‘fundamentalists’ in search of tradition, their experience does nonetheless suggest a kind of transformative event. For many, it is an experience of conversion, in most cases constructed on the basis of material found on the internet. For others, it is a rupture with a past life. When we start to explore the ways those involved make sense of these events, certain themes emerge that reflect popular understandings of the religious: guilt and a search for purification; an encounter with something so powerful and vast that it takes one’s breath away; an experience of the uncanny and déjà vu. In some cases, purification of the self appears as central to violence. Research into the background of Chérif Kouachi, who with his brother killed 12 journalists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, suggests that he possessed what he would come to consider a forbidden sexuality, his computer and mobile phone suggesting that he had at least one male sexual partner (Seelow 2016a). Kouachi’s violent execution of journalists might be understandable as destroying another forbidden, in this case a magazine that had printed images of the Prophet. In other cases of horrific mass killings, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, author of the Nice massacre, had no connection of any kind with religious communities. But his mobile phone also indicated extensive use of online dating sites and a history of sexual encounters with both men and women (Seelow 2016a). Here, too, there may be something present relating to guilt and purification, but ideas such as ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘religious zeal’ do not help us access what is at stake.
Radicalization, vulnerability and identity?
In the years following the September 11 attacks, there was an urgent search for new ways to think about terrorism. One influential response was the publication in 2007 by the New York Police Department of Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat (Silber and Bhatt 2007). This influential report highlighted a new approach focusing on radicalization, understood as progressing through four linear stages: ‘pre-radicalization’, self-identification, indoctrination and ‘jihadization’ – leading to a final outcome, ‘attack’ (2007: 20). This process was understood as ‘internalizing a belief system’, and its focus was ‘Islamic-based terrorism’ (2007: 5). A key concept embedded in this progression was the term ‘indoctrination’, where vulnerable people in search of meaning would be manipulated by others intent upon radicalizing them.
In the years since, this model has proved immensely influential, shaping both academic debate and policy responses. Its focus on ‘indoctrination’ meant that policy and prevention programmes could focus on ‘counter-messaging’, which increasingly came to be understood as ‘counter-narratives’. In that sense, it opened up scope for action. Its use of the term ‘vulnerable’ allowed prevention programmes aiming at protecting, rather than criminalizing, the people they were attempting to engage with, at least in the first instance. The term ‘vulnerable’ was used to describe not only ‘young men’ but also ‘Muslim diaspora communities’ (Silber and Bhatt 2007: 14). Embedded within this idea of vulnerability is an account of responsibility and agency, where radicalization is something ‘done to’ a person. Prevention and counter-radicalization could thus be understood in terms of protecting vulnerable groups, with professional interventions increasingly drawing upon models developed in relation to ‘safeguarding’ other groups identified as vulnerable. If in 2007 ‘indoctrination’ emerged as the master concept to explain radicalization, a decade later this was increasingly explained as a result of ‘grooming’ (Vidino and Hughes 2015: 19), where models developed in relation to internet-based child sexual abuse increasingly became a lens through which to view and prevent radicalization. In such cases, it is increasingly argued, the vulnerable person is not indoctrinated but groomed.
A second approach to radicalization also emphasizes the vulnerability of those who become radicalized, this time arguing vulnerability is a result of social exclusion. The 2007 NYPD report argued: ‘Europe’s failure to integrate the second and third generation of its immigrants into society, both economically and socially, has left many young Muslims torn between the secular West and their religious heritage. This inner conflict makes them especially vulnerable to extremism’ (Silber and Bhatt 2007: 8; emphasis added).
For the authors of this report, while radicalization in the Middle East might be a response to oppression and suffering, ‘radicalization in the West is … a phenomenon that occurs because the individual is looking for an identity and a cause’ (2007: 8; emphasis added). It is this loss of identity that makes the person vulnerable to indoctrination.
These are very influential arguments and became widely used by practitioners involved in the prevention of radicalization. But, while widely used, their empirical basis has been less certain. While influential in the area of child sexual abuse, there is little evidence demonstrating that ‘grooming’ is central to actual experiences of radicalization. Equally, it is not clear why ‘looking for an identity’ in itself is a form of vulnerability. We could argue that the search for an identity has become fundamental to western societies and economies, from the symbolic content of the goods we purchase (brands) to the increasing communicative dimensions of sexuality, gender, age and our bodies themselves.
The problem with these approaches is the extent they consider radicalization to be something done to a person. While this allows a policy response framed in terms of protection, it comes with two principal costs. The first is that we fail to understand or even explore the kinds of agency at work in experiences of radicalization. Rik Coolsaet (2016) describes what he calls ‘the vulnerable youngster paradigm’ in policy responses to radicalization. ‘Jihadis’, he insists, ‘are not passive victims vulnerable to brainwashing by foreign recruiters. They are active participants in their lives, trying to make sense of their world, constructing meanings from available cultural models and making choices accordingly.’ The second problem that flows from considering radicalization as something done to a person is that this isolates the person, imagining them as alone in front of a computer consuming radicalizing messages, and removed from the social relationships and world they inhabit and shape. But as we will see, radicalization is a social process, full of exchanges, communications and shared emotions.
As currently used, the term ‘radicalization’ unifies what may in fact be very different experiences, ranging from medical students motivated by humanitarianism, gang members in search of adventure or persons wishing to cleanse themselves of their guilt. As authors such as Farhad Khosrokhavar (2017) argue, pathways to such violence are associated with different forms of sociability. In many cases, such transitions take place in small, enclosed groups. The most obvious indicator is the significant incidence of ‘brother’ relationships, such as 2013 Boston bombers Dzlokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Kouachi brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre, brothers Brahim and Salah Abdeslam at the centre of the November 2015 Paris attacks, or the El Bakraoui brothers who undertook the March 2016 suicide attack at Brussels airport. In other cases, couple relationships are central, where risk and danger combine with erotic imaginaries of sex and death. Other types of sociability also recur, in particular associated with periods in prison or youth detention, often linked with backgrounds in different forms of street crime such as theft, assault or drug dealing. Social class occurs as a structuring principle in a significant number of cases, to the extent that different types of trajectory, for example associated with stigmatization, poverty or fractured family background, appear associated with particular forms of violence. Meanwhile, other trajectories appear more associated with what Luc Boltanski (1999) calls ‘distant suffering’. Travel surfaces as a particularly important dimension, whether travelling in search of jihad or as part of humanitarian convoys to camps. In such cases, journeys are linked to an experience that allows a person to transform in a way that they become a ‘foreigner in their own land’ (Khosrokhavar 2017). This dimension of ‘becoming a stranger’ appears associated with other experiences of displacement, where the world itself becomes strange and uncanny, full of hidden meaning. Such experiences of ‘strangeness’ highlight the importance of conspiracy theories in trajectories to violence, something we also find in a particular openness to ‘the extraordinary’ that we encounter in video games and images of hidden potency, very influential in some of the earlier European movements that embraced jihadism, such as 19 HH in France, which combines support for jihadist movements with a culture of the ‘epic’ and the ‘extraordinary’. In this case, support for jihad is constructed through a visceral experience resembling The Lord of the Rings more than anything we might expect to find in religious or political movements. Still other paths to jihadist violence appear more shaped by the culture of computer gamers, with widespread references to games such as Call of Duty and its imaginary of the anti-hero and its world without norms or limits, or in Islamic State’s ‘Cyber Caliphate’, which appears more inspired by the youth culture we encounter in Anonymous (McDonald 2015) than religious cultures or political traditions. Once we begin to explore these experiences, we do not decipher a linear path of structured stages, but a much more complex experience that appears organized more around tensions than stages.
While unifying what constitutes radicalization, much of the current debate also separates the violence associated with radicalization from other forms of violence that may in fact possess significant similarities but may not be regarded as significant from the perspective of terrorism studies. For example, once we begin to explore actual experiences of radicalization, we discover many that are constructed in relation to imaginaries of purity and filth and, as we will see, these manifest significant convergences with hate crime and racism. Many experiences of radicalization draw on conspiracy theories and an associated imaginary of plots and hidden meanings, mirroring important dimensions of contemporary popular culture. In other cases, jihadist violence suggests significant convergence with other forms of mass killing, most notably the school shootings that have become increasingly prevalent in North America, and to a lesser extent in Europe, over the past two decades. All this suggests that we need to break with the idea of the isolated and vulnerable person being indoctrinated and explore commonalities shared between experiences of radicalization and hate crime, rampage killings or fascination with conspiracy.
This book
This book is based on two kinds of research. The first is extensive fieldwork undertaken with members of al-Muhajiroun and its successor networks in the United Kingdom, in particular the Movement Against Crusaders (MAC). Al-Muhajiroun is a banned or proscribed group in the United Kingdom. It splintered from another radical group in the late 1990s and has come to play a role as a key channel for British young people to embrace jihadist violence. Michael Adebolajo, one of the killers of Lee Rigby, was part of this network, through which a number of people have attempted or succeeded in travelling to Syria. Al-Muhajiroun also served as a model and support for other groups such as Sharia4Belgium, the group where Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the leader of the Paris attacks of November 2015, first came across jihadist networks. The fieldwork we undertook with people involved in this group took place over a four-year period from 2009 to 2013, involving in-depth interviews and focus groups with some fifty supporters of jihadist action, including several people who were later imprisoned under UK anti-terrorism legislation.
The second type of data this book draws upon is the social media activity of British, French and American young people who either attempted to, or succeeded in, travelling to Syria to join jihadist groups, or who attempted to undertake violent action in their home country. During the period 2013–2015, there was a vast amount of jihadist material on different social media platforms while, in the period since, much has been removed. In some cases, however, there remains a significant digital ‘footprint’ that allows us to capture radicalization as a lived experience. In other cases the digital material is more fragmented but nonetheless offers critical insight into dimensions of a lived experience.
Much of this book is a digital ethnography seeking to bring social worlds and exchanges to life. To capture their immediacy, such exchanges have not been edited. This means errors in spelling or punctuation that may appear in posts or tweets have not been corrected, confronting and offensive language has not been filtered, and confused use of language has not been amended. This is because the closer we are to actual communications, the more we can learn: errors in spelling may capture urgent or rapid exchanges; confused use of language may be a sign of a struggle to articulate; while confronting and offensive language is central to experiences of radicalization. In writing this book, however, the aim has been to present and discuss such material in ways that do not set out to offend or shock. In some cases, where I analyse the way people in Europe respond to material they find online, links to such material are not included if there is any doubt regarding the legality of accessing it, a situation that varies greatly across countries.
Social media are not central to all pathways to radicalization, as we will see when we consider radicalization in prison. But it is so fundamental today that we have placed it at the centre of chapter 2, where we explore the radicalization experience of Aqsa Mahmood, who travelled to Syria in November 2013. While still in the United Kingdom, she encountered distant suffering, and came to invent an experiential world structured around an opposition between purity and impurity, disgust and the grotesque, where humour occupies a central place, both as a mechanism of inclusion and as a means to say what is unsayable. Many readers will find this a long chapter, but it is so for a reason. It wants to capture a life lived through social media, a world of fun and ‘fam’, which undergoes an extraordinary transformation in a remarkably short time. There are very few published cases of transformations such as Mahmood’s, and her extraordinary social media ‘footprint’ allows us to explore her experience but also to identify themes and questions that will recur in other chapters as well.
Chapter 3 explores what may first appear to be a religious structure to jihadism, but which reveals itself to be of a different nature, one organized around the hidden and the revealed, closely associated with sensory regimes of vastness, risk, power and anxiety. I do so through interviews with members of al-Muhajiroun who ended up being convicted of violent offences related to radicalization; I also explore the inspiration for much of the first wave of jihadists to travel to Syria from France, the epic 19-HH videos created by Omar Diaby. In chapter 4, I explore the development of fan cultures and particular types of mass killings involving what I am calling ‘revelatory violence’. This sets out to learn lessons from the experience of school shootings and the cultures that have formed around these. I complete the chapter by exploring an example of people on social media responding to atrocity, noting the ways extreme violence not only takes the life, but also the humanity, of the victim. In chapter 5, I consider the increasing importance of criminal pathways in jihadist violence, drawing on interviews with people who had conversion experiences in prison, together with social media material produced by British fighters in Syria, where we see the importance of the anti-hero and adventure. Chapter 6 explores what we can call the ‘gamification’ of jihad, evident not only in the recurring importance of imaginaries of video games in jihadist culture but also in the association of knowledge and power that is so important both to these games and to the jihadist imaginary. Chapter 7 focuses on the central importance of selfhood and self-transformation in jihadist violence, where we examine in more depth the purification of the self, together with the extent to which suicide–murder may increasingly link jihadist violence with depressive experience. Chapter 8 draws these themes together, considering both the extent to which we can identify different pathways present in jihadist violence and the implications for prevention programmes.
Social media: affect and embodied imagination
This book sets out to explore radicalization not as something done to people, but as something produced by active participants, attempting to make sense of themselves and their world. But sense making is not simply a question of ideas. The word sense underlines feelings, emotions, embodied states and sensations. It alerts us to the feeling that something is happening that can be lived as pleasure or shock, perturbing or traumatic (Stewart 2007: 2). Increasingly, researchers are attempting to capture this in terms of the idea of affect, something that involves both body and mind, where we recognize ‘our power to affect the world around us and to be affected by it’ (Clough 2007: ix). Kathleen Stewart argues that it is our capacity ‘to affect and be affected’ that allows our everyday life to be experienced as a ‘continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences’, where we find ‘forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, and modes of attention, attachment and agency’, where we form ‘publics and social worlds of all kinds’ (Stewart 2007: 2). From this perspective, radicalization is not the vulnerable, isolated person consuming videos. Radicalization is the action of constructing a ‘social world’ shaped more by trans-personal intensities and feelings (Stewart 2007) than by membership in organizations or political programmes. Radicalization becomes a form of embodied meaning making (Wetherell 2012: 4), one where the ability to feel certain things makes it possible to think certain things. This is fundamentally an embodied sociality as Hilary Pilkington argues, ‘practice rooted in social life and concrete activities’ (2016: 202).
This is what makes social media important to contemporary radicalization. Not because it is a medium for foreign recruiters to access and brainwash vulnerable young people but rather because social media, above all in the world of young people, are a continuous flow of affect, a medium of ‘networked intimacy’ (Garde-Hansen and Gorton 2013). Social media are best understood as ‘sensory’ channels where we encounter practices of ‘being’ with others (Petersen 2008) and ways of ‘being-in-the-world’ where ‘I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation’ (Deleuze 1981: 31, emphasis in original). Here, we discover immersive experiences that expand but also limit what is sensed and how it is sensed (Thrift 2011), in experiences of acceleration, urgency, displacement, distortion, pleasure, excitement or boredom.
In the 1980s, much of the sociological work on communication was influenced by thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas (1984) or Noam Chomsky (1965) who emphasized the rationality embedded within language and linguistic structures. Today, we are much more aware that communication takes place within and constitutes what Adi Kuntsman calls ‘affective fabrics’: ‘the lived and deeply felt everyday sociality of connections, ruptures, emotions, words, politics and sensory energies, some of which can be pinned down to words or structures; others are intense yet ephemeral’ (Kuntsman 2012: 2). Once we begin to explore the ‘affective fabric’ that is radicalization, we find an extraordinary production and circulation of images, sounds, words, experiences of acceleration and urgency, shock, horror, strangeness, beauty or disgust. Attempting to engage with this not only involves trying to contribute to our understanding of radicalization; it also seeks to contribute to a social science able to capture the ways in which contemporary social actors interact, explore and construct meaning together.
Take, for example, an image posted to social media by a young Danish man using the nom de guerre or kunya Abu Fulan al-Muhajir, after his first few months in Syria (Figure 1.1). His photo captures an instant, one that he entitles Sunset in Shaam, seen through my #Glock. Many jihadist fighters take pictures of weapons that come to possess the status of a companion that they love and trust, a pattern replicating European student terrorists of the 1980s (McDonald 2013). But this image captures something more than just a trusted companion. In a moment the sun will be gone. The image captures something beautiful but ephemeral, an experience made possible through an instrument that makes him who he is. As well as the beauty of jihad, this image captures an experience of decompression, of a break with a world experienced as claustrophobic, a new reality offering openness and freedom. It creates a sensation, one that makes it possible to think in certain ways.
Such images continue to have an extraordinary resonance in the culture of the jihad, whether demonstrating power or capturing the ephemeral. Many fighters in Syria would film their day-to-day existence as though they were ‘micro-celebrities’ (Tufekci 2013) or characters in a reality television show. One of the most striking examples is Brussels-born Abdelhamid Abaaoud who returned from Syria to lead the attack in Paris in November 2015. While in Syria, he regularly wore a GoPro HD video camera around his chest or his hat and would send updates of his life to his social media followers in Belgium. He filmed himself in situations ranging from acting as a sniper to driving a four-wheel drive, dragging the corpses of executed victims to be buried in a mass grave. There is something in such ‘mediation’ of the self that is of fundamental importance to understanding radicalization. Historically, actors involved in extreme violence have gone to great lengths to hide killings they have perpetrated, from Nazi death camps to the executions that took place during the Balkan wars in Europe. Some kind of transformation has occurred, where today violent actors such as Abaaoud will film killings and upload them to social media, completely reversing the earlier logic. This extends beyond violence in Syria. In 2015, a young man in the British city of Reading posted images of an improvised explosive device that he had constructed, asking his followers for advice about what to target: ‘Westfield shopping centre or London underground? Any advice would be appreciated greatly’ (Twitter, 12 May 2015). Other violent actors attempt to structure the media reception of their action, as in the attack on an anti-Muslim event in Garland, Texas in the same month. The two men involved announced their action several hours before it was to take place, creating a Twitter hashtag #texasattack to facilitate reception of their action. This is an example of what media theorists call ‘pre-mediation’.
Figure 1.1
