The jihadogenous urban structure (original) (raw)
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Universität Duisburg Essen publication, The Jihadist Social Actors in Europe.pdf
E. Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, H. J. Abs, & P. Müller (Eds.), Thematic papers based on the Conference “Migration, Social Transformation, and Education for Democratic Citizenship” (pp. 243-273). University of Duisburg-Essen: DuEPublico. , 2019
With the term jihadism, I refer to a religious and political phenomenon based on a radical version of Islam that claims to be the genuine and unique embodiment of Allah’s religion, all the others being fake. It is based on the primacy of jihad, that is, violence in the name of God, in order to impose on the world its religious norms, which it has reinterpreted in the light of radical Islam. Since the emergence of Islamic State (IS or ISIS) in 2014, jihadism has brought new agents to the world stage, especially in the West. Its advent multiplied the calls for jihad among Western young people, and particularly among European young people. Among them were adolescents and post-adolescents,1 but also young people of migrant origin, middle class converts, people with psychological problems (from depression to major psychopathologies), and women. In this article, I choose to deal only with young people of migrant origin, the middle class, and women jihadists.
The Jihadist Social Actors in Europe
2019
With the term jihadism, I refer to a religious and political phenomenon based on a radical version of Islam that claims to be the genuine and unique embodiment of Allah’s religion, all the others being fake. It is based on the primacy of jihad, that is, violence in the name of God, in order to impose on the world its religious norms, which it has reinterpreted in the light of radical Islam. Since the emergence of Islamic State (IS or ISIS) in 2014, jihadism has brought new agents to the world stage, especially in the West. Its advent multiplied the calls for jihad among Western young people, and particularly among European young people. Among them were adolescents and post-adolescents, but also young people of migrant origin, middle class converts, people with psychological problems (from depression to major psychopathologies), and women. In this article, I choose to deal only with young people of migrant origin, the middle class, and women jihadists.
e Western Imaginary of Jihadism
Social Imaginaries 5.2 (2019) 75-104, 2019
Western jihadism is a complex phenomenon in which the imaginary dimension, the subjectivity of the actors linked to their socioeconomic condition but also to their ethnicity, and beyond that, what I call their subjectiva-tion (the ability to empower oneself as a social actor), play a signi cant role. In Europe, among the Muslim o shoots of migrant workers, most of the psychological developments associated with Jihadism occurs in very speci c urban structures, the poor districts or suburbs, where a high concentration of urban poor live with a burden of social stigma linked to the high criminality rate. ese settings are often de facto ghettoes. e development of a speci c urban imagination often gives meaning to the jihadist commitment among young people living in this type of settlement. is imaginary often feeds on a feeling of stigmatization among these people. Jihadism is not a quest for meaning, but its discovery, the wielding of it through embracing death and in icting it on the 'in dels'. It is, in another way, a punishment of society, an act of vengeance against it, be it due to personal reasons (mainly for the young downtrodden of the immigrant origin who feel stigmatized by the society) or due to the lack of ideal, utopia and social justice in society (the case of the young middle class people). is study aims at underlining the fact that social imaginaries should be at the root of socio-anthropological analysis and without understanding the meaning of social action, quantitative views give us at best a unilateral, at most a distorted view of social action and social behavior.
The new European Jihadism and its avatars
Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society – J-RaT, 2016
The newEuropean Jihadism and its avatars FarhadKhosrokhavar European Jihadism has evolvedsince it first appeared in the 1990s.Inmany European countries,atthe outset, it tended to be restricted to the disaffected youth from the poor suburbs (France) or poor inner city areas (in the UK),but it rapidly spread to the middle classes,whether Muslims or converts.In2013, with the civil war in Syria, Jihadismunderwentmajor changes.Before that it was restrictedtoafew hundred people,but it has now risen to severalthousand (around 5000 young people have left Europe for Syria and their number would have been much higher had the governments not established controls preventing the departure of adolescents via Tu rkey to Syria). At the same time,adolescents have become numerous and the number of girlsa nd converts has sharply increased. Theaim of the article is to propose an understanding of the mindsetofthese new social actors in the lightofthe internal conditions of European societies.
Terrorism And The City: Interactionism & Political-Economy on the Causes Of Urban Terrorism
2016
The last two decades have seen the proliferation of organized, extremely violent acts against cities, the citizens who reside in them, and the support systems that make them work; collectively, these have resulted in more and more civilian and domestic spaces of urban civil society to re-emerge as geopolitically charged ones (Graham, 2004). Cities are deemed to be prime locations for the infliction of terror as they are formulated on the basis of density. This, in turn, allows urban spaces to act as the primary background for the operation of terrorist networks (Turk, 2004), most intelligibly understandable through the social network analysis of the phenomena (Hulst, 2008). Subsequently, the cause of terrorism, as defined by interactionism, circulates the influence of social ties on social behaviour (Agnew, 2010). On the other hand, is the belief that the political and/or economic inequalities found in cities are the roots of this form of violence (Turk, 2004). The political-economy approach thus sees terrorism as a response to perceptions of indignity and frustrations emerging from repressive social control implemented by those in power (Arena and Arrigo, 2005). Today, given that over fifty percent of the world’s population live in urban environments, which by their very nature are challenging to defend, the threat terrorist organizations impose on global security is alarmingly proliferating. This rapidly developing phenomenon needs to be subdued. To do so, it is the very roots of terrorism that need to be identified, analyzed, and ultimately tampered.
Terrorism and Political Violence, 2011
The article explores ideological fault lines among Sunni Muslim militants (jihadists) in Europe since the mid-1990s. It argues there have been disputes among the militants about whether to prioritize local struggles or Al Qaeda's global war, and about the legitimacy of launching terrorist attacks in European states offering political asylum to Muslims. It concludes that Europe's militants have become more ideologically unified in conjunction with the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Mohammed drawings, seeing European countries as legitimate and prioritized targets, and identifying with Al Qaeda.
Cities, terrorism and urban wars of the 21st century
2007
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Islamic Radicalism, Jihad and Geography of Uncertainty
The recent news from the Middle East and about the facts occurred in France during the last January pose some questions to geography: what kind of geographical and political project is proposing the Islamic State (IS)?; is that a real State, which is changing the political geographies of the Middle East?; are the borders being redefined by its action?; finally: what kind of military engagement could be taken by Europe? This contribute tries to underline these questions, proposing a lecture of the changes occurring between Syria and Iraq, but maybe also in Nigeria and Yemen, of a geography of uncertainty. With this image the article tries to give an idea of the struggle between two different conceptions of the political spaces, that is producing a significant uncertainty about the borders and the territorial definition of political powers. The internal fragmentation of Iraq and Syria, strongly evident, seems to derive from the IS’ attempt to impose a different political model from the Western one: this conflict – between a universalist and religious model and a Western one – seems to contribute to produce a geography of uncertainty.