Articles of the month: Mar 2021

In recent years, extremists have increasingly turned to online spaces to distribute propaganda and as a recruitment tool. While there is a clear need for governments and social media companies to respond to these efforts, such responses also bring with them a set of ethical challenges. This paper provides an ethical analysis of key policy responses to online extremist propaganda. It identifies the ethical challenges faced by policy responses and details the ethical foundations on which such policies can potentially be justified in a modern liberal democracy. We also offer an ethical framework in which policy responses to online extremism in liberal democracies can be grounded, setting clear parameters upon which future policies can be built in a fast-changing online environment.

This article explores the Taliban’s insurgency (2007–2009) in Swat Valley (northern Pakistan) and the multiple meanings of violence in this context. A thematic analysis of data collected through qualitative fieldwork finds that the violence experienced by the victims was understood in three ways: physically as bodily harm, psychologically as terror and fear, and socially in the form of humiliation and dishonor. By delving into the experiences of civilians, the article offers a victim-centered approach and argues that instances of violence were characterized by harm as a “core referent.” It further argues for a context-specific understanding of harm and explicates that this notion is also determined by the local culture of Swat Valley, Pashtunwali.

Experts opine that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) responded to its loss of control over major population centers in Iraq and Syria that constituted its self-described “caliphate” by internationalizing its patterns of terrorist violence, committing higher-profile attacks abroad, and exploiting sectarian conflicts in other countries. In this study, we test this conventional wisdom. We theorize that the loss of population centers prompted ISIS to conduct more attacks abroad, to shift its attack venues abroad, and to cause higher casualties abroad. Using original time series data on ISIS control over major cities, we find empirical support for our theoretical assumptions.

Drawing upon interviews and a variety of newspapers and other media associated with the Sudanese Islamic Movement, this article analyses historic developments in its strategy for the Islamization of the now independent region of southern Sudan with particular reference to the experience of members of the movement from that region. It identifies significant parallels between the colonial and Islamist designs for “civilizing” southern Sudanese, arguing that like its colonial predecessor the “Civilizational Project” of Hasan al-Turabi’s “Salvation Regime” alternated between assimilating and excluding them. The post-1989 Islamist regime’s treatment of Islamist southerners before and after the secession of the south in 2011 highlighted the division between these assimilationist and exclusionary trends. Although the movement was largely unsuccessful in recruiting southern members, those who did join were not simply Islamist satellites – like Islamists from the other marginalized regions, they sought to use the Movement to traverse the social divide between center and periphery, sometimes in a manner that challenged the riverain elites that dominated it. In thus deconstructing the notion that Islamic movements are ideologically and socially homogenous, the article contributes a fresh perspective on the debate about Arabization and Islamization in Sudan as well as center–periphery relations in post-colonial contexts.

In 2012, several Jihadi armed groups stormed the northern part of Mali and became the unchallenged rulers of two-thirds of the country. Each group governed based on Islamic Law, codifying violence against their enemies in combat and the populations they controlled. Despite drawing on similar jihadist ideology, these governing systems differed significantly in their uses of violence and jurisprudence. What explains the emergence and legitimization of such contrasting norms? We compare patterns of violence and restraint in the regions of Kidal and Gao based on interviews with diverse protagonists of the occupation, including former members of Ansar Dine and the Movement for the Unity of Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO). In Kidal, the Ansar Dine commander’s decision to follow local Islamic jurisprudence limited violence. In contrast, MUJAO rule over Gao used forms of punishment encompassing physical violence to assert political hegemony despite opposition from influential local imams and youth movements. Figures among the noncombatant population also influenced the formation and interpretation of norms among these groups, though less so under strong military imperatives. The findings highlight the importance of searching for a common language over norms of government between insurgents and populations as a key source of restraint.

Relations between religion and nationalism, as two identity forms, has been debated in Muslim countries, especially where the nationalist trends coincided with the rise of religious reformation and Pan-Islamic movements. This article scrutinizes discourses on linking a transnational ideology of Pan-Islamism with Afghan nationalism in an early twentieth century nationalist newspaper, Seraj-ul Akhbar. The newspaper presents a unique case for this study since it was a platform for dissemination of both ideologies simultaneously. Unlike the later Muslim Brotherhood intellectuals and Muhammad Iqbal, Seraj-ul Akhbar authors did not see a contradiction between Pan-Islamism and territorial nationalism. They formulated a universal Muslim unity going through the national state structure, but not bypassing them. Meanwhile, Seraj-ul Akhbar appropriated the religious language for strengthening national unity. In this way, nationalistic and Pan-Islamic concepts were used to craft a nationally stable identity. It is argued that Pan-Islamism is not a unitary universal transnational ideology, rather it is often embedded in different national, language, and ethnic boundaries.

Imagine the horror of seeing a child in a video executing an individual. Islamic State (IS) raised the brutality of their violence by showcasing children as executioners in their propaganda videos. The first IS child propaganda video was released on 13 January 2015. Entitled, Uncovering an Enemy Within, the video featured a young Kazakh boy, Abdullah, executing two men by shooting them in the back of their heads. The men were purportedly Russian spies.

The youngest European child to be showcased in an IS propaganda video was a four-year-old British child called Isa Dare. He is the son of Grace “Khadija” Dare who married a Swedish IS fighter called Abu Bakr. In December 2014, Bakr died in the global coalition air raid against IS. Nicknamed Junior Jihadi, the four-year old was given a central role in the video. He used a remote control and blew up a car with four alleged spies. Towards the end of the video, a British teenager warned Prime Minister David Cameron to get the British army ready to fight IS child soldiers, pointing to Junior Jihadi....

In research on terrorism and political violence, “fieldwork” now means many things. Scholars conduct interviews online, meet former extremists in urban centers, and travel across the globe to interview ex-combatants. But in this world of social media and constant connectivity, it is no longer possible to fully leave the “field.” Complicating matters is that researchers often do not speak openly about the ethical dilemmas they face—both during and after fieldwork—fearing it might damage their credibility. While various scholars have explored the ethical complexities of fieldwork in conflict-affected areas, there has been little discussion in political science on ethical challenges after fieldwork, and even less on how these post-fieldwork experiences are often highly gendered. Once fieldwork is over, what challenges do researchers face, what are researchers’ obligations to participants, and what types of regulations guide this behavior—especially when participants are former violent actors? What are the power dynamics between researchers and participants, how does gender affect these dynamics, and how do these relationships guide future interactions? For example, how do researchers deal with post-fieldwork requests for money or assistance? And how do scholars decide what to publish, and when, if they have received threats, or if threats to their participants change? Based on my experiences conducting over hundred interviews across Colombia, this paper argues that ethical review processes lack adequate consideration of ongoing ethical issues after fieldwork in conflict-affected environments, especially regarding contact with former insurgents. In addition, I argue that the tension between demands for transparency and adequately protecting both participants and researchers creates a disincentive to have open conversations about these dilemmas—especially among junior scholars.

Primary human sources involved with or proximate to terrorist actors can provide critical information and insights for understanding terrorist ideologies, behaviors and orientations. Yet accessing and drawing on their knowledge and experience is bound up with a range of constraints and risks. Some of these are practical, but others are either ethical, moral or both. Terrorism research can be constructed as a moral field of enquiry insofar as it proposes to generate scientifically defendable and socially useful knowledge that will help repel or mitigate the personal, social and political harms of terrorism in ways that respect human rights and freedoms. In turn, this potentially positions terrorism researchers as moral agents engaged in knowledge production for the greater collective social and political good. However, assuming the general moral orientation of terrorism researchers does not really help us understand how terrorism researchers navigate moral complexity or moral competition when faced with irreconcilable or asymmetrical ethical frameworks that can come into conflict. Indeed, terrorism researchers can become (drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s distinction between ethics and morality) caught between “ethical” responsibility for participants on the one hand, and “moral” responsibility for the greater good, on the other. One potential response to this lies in constructing what might be called “necessary fictions” in how we represent our primary human data. However, what look like “necessary fictions” from an ethical standpoint—mitigating the vulnerability of participants through taking ethical responsibility for the others we encounter—can become shaky ground from a moral standpoint when benchmarked against expectations governing facticity and authenticity in social science research. This is a wicked problem for terrorism research: in seeking ethically to minimize vulnerabilities for participants, do such strategies create other and deeper moral vulnerabilities for the field? This paper will attempt to unpack these issues drawing on our own recent research experiences in the field of countering violent extremism.

The scholarship on radicalization to violence often treats born Muslims and converts interchangeably; far too little research is focused on understanding the factors and processes driving converts in particular. This is a problem given that there is overwhelming evidence demonstrating that Muslim converts are overrepresented among Western foreign fighters. Data from Canada corroborates this larger point: converts are highly representative in attempted and successful domestic terrorist attacks. Our article explores conversion to Islam and political violence as it relates to recent trends in Canadian Jihadist militancy. We distill the theoretical literature on conversion and radicalization to seven explanatory factors, including ideology; social networks; charismatic authority; political grievances; psychology; socio-economic and criminal circumstance; and enabling environments. We then build original empirical case studies –based on expert interviews and open-sourced documents –of three Canadian converts who engaged in terrorism, including John Maguire, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, and Damian Clairmont. Using these case studies, we contextualize, analyze, and expand our collective understanding of conversion to violence, providing lessons for theory and methodology.