Articles of the month: Marth 2020

A jihadist-aligned Indonesian fundraising group, the Abu Ahmed Foundation (AAF), has been developing close connections with Uyghur and Central Asian fighters in Syria. This link could become a vector for fighters to exit from Syria, and a source of potential risks to Southeast Asia.

Because women are assumed to be nonviolent, their participation in militant groups can humanize organizations and legitimize rebellion. But gender beliefs are deeply engrained, and consequently women’s involvement can also generate resistance. This article explores how militants navigate this tension through their political visuals, specifically analyzing images of ‘armed mothers’ across six diverse conflicts. Leveraging life-giving as the ‘natural’ role for women, these images signal violent disruption of everyday life and authorize political violence in response. But they also stress the temporariness of gender-role expansion, promising and preserving a ‘return to normal’. Militant groups contextualize, justify, and humanize violent struggle through these images even in cases where women rarely participate on the front lines.

The U.S. government list of state sponsors of terrorism is dated, politicized, analytically muddy, and in general not useful for distinguishing which states truly sponsor terrorism and how aggressively they do so. A better list and process would identify different criteria that go into sponsoring terrorism and, in so doing, create multiple de facto lists. Lists would distinguish important factors such as the use of terrorism in war and the problematic criterion of states using their own clandestine agents for terrorism-like violence. Different forms of passive support would also be assessed, particularly because state passivity is often vital for jihadists and white supremacists, two of the greatest terrorism dangers today. The political and analytically flawed nature of the state sponsor list and process, however, is as much by design as it is by accident, and change is especially difficult as a result.

In western public discourse, as well as in parts of academia, Sufism and Salafism are sometimes portrayed as arch enemies in Islam. However, so far, very few studies have analyzed in detail the polemics between Sufis and Salafis in a western setting. This article tries to fill this gap by providing a snapshot of the critique of Salafism by the Sufi Nāẓimiyya order, as well as the response from the British Salafi spectrum. It will argue that although both protagonists would perceive themselves in the same way as outlined above, in fact both groups are influenced by each other with regard to the benchmark of what constitutes “authentic Islam”, as well as the ways in which arguments are portrayed as legitimately grounded in Islamic thought. These insights may help in better understanding the complexities of contemporary intra-Muslim debates and representations.

Social identity has been identified as one key contributor to violent extremism. In a survey consisting of 198 Australian Muslims, we examined the associations between social identity and perceived injustice in the political and media field and whether these are associated with susceptibility to supporting violent extremism. The study canvassed belonging, religiosity, violent dispositions, experienced racism and reported strong senses of perceived injustice, alienation and anger. Overall, the study revealed that the greater the sense of belonging and religiosity, the greater the rejection of violent dispositions against the West and its allies. The inverse of this suggests that a sense of non-belonging is associated with increased support to radicalisation. We also found that the greater the religiosity, the greater the connection to Australia and the greater the rejection of violent dispositions. Our sample reported a strong sense of perceived injustice from the political media structures, even more so among those with a greater sense of belonging to Australia. The study demonstrates that there is high opposition to acts of violent extremism despite a widely held sense of injustice, indicating strong levels of resilience among the Muslim communities in Australia and pointing to the potential virtue of multiculturalism.

After the proclamation of the so-called Islamic State in June 2014 thousands of Europeans, including hundreds of Austrian residents, went to fight and live with ISIS or other extremist groups in Syria or Iraq. Austria is one of the European countries with the highest per-capita share of foreign fighters. The article gives a broad overview of the situation in Austria: Who are the different groups relevant in this field? How did young people who grew up in Austria become radicalised, and what is their current status? The data from two Austrian commissioned research projects and one EU-funded project are supplemented by the findings of recent research in northern Syria focusing on the current situation of Austrian foreign fighters and their families and supporters in the region.