Articles of the month: Apr 2021

This study asks whether governmental and societal discrimination against Muslim minorities explains the outflow of foreign fighters from non-Muslim-majority countries to Syria and Iraq. We use data from the ICSR, Soufan Group, Pokalova (2018), and RASM datasets to examine the connection between discrimination directed at Muslim minorities and the number of foreign fighters originating in a country. We apply grievance-based theory to examine whether minority-specific objective discrimination is behind the phenomenon. We find little evidence that discrimination increases the outflow of foreign fighters, but this outflow is higher from wealthier countries. The findings indicate that if grievances are a motivation for individuals to become foreign fighters, they are not connected to objective discrimination. This implies that at least some of the grievances relate to personal circumstances or that immigrant minorities are more likely to perceive inequality in wealthier countries.

The potential threat posed by returning and repatriated foreign fighters and the upcoming release of homegrown violent extremists from prisons in developed democracies has raised interest in terrorist rehabilitation programs. Few studies, however, systematically examine how the public views such programs. Drawing on research on public attitudes toward prisoner reentry in criminology and social psychological theory, this study offers a series of hypotheses about support for rehabilitation programming for terrorist offenders. These hypotheses are then tested through a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of 1,021 adult citizens in the United States. The results show that the public is less supportive of postrelease rehabilitation programming for terrorists than other criminal offenders. Support is also lower when an Islamist, rather than a white nationalist, offender is referenced. Support increases when a referenced Islamist is described as a juvenile convicted of a less serious offense. Men, younger individuals, those with some college education, and self-identified liberals are more likely to support terrorist rehabilitation programming. Finally, irrespective of treatment, respondents are most likely to cite evidence of effectiveness as the factor that would increase their support for rehabilitation programming.

This study explores the internal dynamics and networks of terrorist groups in cyberspace—in particular, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Using a “Global Cyberterrorism Dataset” that features data on cyberterror attacks between 2011 and 2016, this research analyzes these two terrorist groups through the lens of a cyber-conflict theory that integrates conflict theory with Jaishankar’s space transition theory. Through a network analysis methodology, we examine the invisible relationships and connections between the national origins and target countries of cyberterror attacks. The analysis focuses on the networks of national origins of terrorists and victims, network structures of Al-Qaeda and ISIS actors, and clustering networks of Al-Qaeda and ISIS cyberterrorists. Results indicate that terror in cyberspace is ubiquitous, more flexible than traditional terrorism, and that cyberattacks mostly occurred within the countries of origin. We conclude by discussing the complex features of cyberterror networks and identify some of the geostrategic implications of the divergent cyber strategies adopted by Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Shame avoidance or repair can serve as a powerful source of motivation, a view shared by violent Islamist (VI) organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and al-Qaeda, whose respective propaganda activities seek to shame sympathizers into action by dislodging them from positions of inactivity or indecisiveness. Utilizing concepts contained in Benford and Snow’s notion of experiential commensurability, this article will examine how VI organizations seek to induce shame among their targets of mobilization by facilitating comparison and instilling a sense of accountability.

While there has been growing concern about the use of technology by terrorist groups to organize and execute violence, there has been much less academic work on the effectiveness of governmental efforts to control the use of technology to prevent terrorist violence. Governments across the world have relied on network shutdowns to tackle violence, amongst other ends. Using data from one such country, Pakistan, this paper examines the effectiveness of disrupting cellphone networks as acounterterrorism strategy to tackle terrorist violence. This paper relies on daily data on terrorist violence in Pakistan from January 2012 to December 2017 combined with data on government-mandated cellphone shutdowns. The results show a statistically significant decline in the number of terrorist attacks on the day of cellphone shutdowns and an increase in terrorist attacks on the day after cellphone shutdown. Overall, it is argued that while cellphone shutdowns might displace terrorist violence from one day to the next, they are not an effective way to tackle terrorist violence.

This article aims to map the online propaganda presence and activities of the Turkestan Islamic Party’s media arm—Islam Awazi (“Voice of Islam”). It also discusses its capabilities in terms of producing new releases and attracting online audiences. In order to reach these objectives, this study exploited a methodology which is a combination of open source intelligence techniques (OSINT) with limited content analysis. It argues that the Uyghur-oriented Islam Awazi’s (IA) propaganda strategy was primarily based on one standalone website, which constituted a central repository of its new productions. It was supported by several Telegram channels. However, open source intelligence investigation allowed other domains proliferating the IA’s productions, which were still accessible but abandoned at the time when this study was carried out, to be discovered. It also proved that the organization was capable of producing more than 160 propaganda releases between January and September 2020. Their viewership on the surface web was, however, quite limited. Finally, this study also outlines a peculiar connection between Islam Awazi’s websites and two networks of domains exploited by the cyber-criminal underground to distribute pornography and malware. This may be considered as a sign of an existing—and widely discussed by the academia—terror-crime nexus.

The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats presents the updated and expanded Database on Suicide Attacks (DSAT), which now links to Uppsala Conflict Data Program data on armed conflicts and includes a new dataset measuring the alliance and rivalry relationships among militant groups with connections to suicide attack groups. We assess global trends in suicide attacks over four decades, and demonstrate the value of the expanded DSAT with special attention to the growing diffusion of suicide attacks in armed conflicts and the large role of networks established by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State through 2019 in this diffusion. Overall, the expanded DSAT demonstrates the advantages of integration across datasets of political violence for expanding research on important outcomes, generating new knowledge about the spread of particularly deadly forms of political violence, and raising important new questions about the efficacy of current policies to curb their spread.