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Recently, the Somali diaspora has found itself at the centre of heightened security concerns surrounding the proliferation of international terrorist networks and their recruitment strategies. These concerns have reached new levels since the absorption of al-Shabaab into al-Qaeda in 2012. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with 118 members of Canada's largest Somali community, this article draws upon narrative criminology to reverse the 'why they joined' question that serves as the predicate for much recent radicalization scholarship, and instead explores, 'why they would never join'. We encounter Somali-Canadians equipping themselves with sophisticated counternarratives that vitiate the enticements of al-Shabaab. Particularly, notions of 'coolness', 'trickery' and 'religious perversion' mediate participants' perceptions of al-Shabaab and enable a self-empowering rejection of its recruitment narratives. In particular, we find resonances between the narratives of non-recruits and 'bogeyman' narratives that exist commonly in many cultures. The efficacy of these narratives for resilience is three-fold, positioning the recruiters as odious agents, recruits as weak-minded dupes and our participants as knowledgeable storytellers who can forewarn others against recruitment to al-Shabaab.

The research for this article is based on original biographical and relational data on 1,019 foreign fighters from France, Germany, and the UK who had traveled to a conflict country due to their Jihadi convictions between the years 2000 and 2016. It investigates where and how they had radicalized. The findings suggest that foreign fighters were primarily recruited through interpersonal or religious organizational networks. Salafist mosques, radical religious associations, and more informal groups dedicated to proselytizing were particularly crucial to the radicalization process. In contrast, contexts such as the Internet or prisons were comparably less relevant to the radicalization process of foreign fighters. The important role of interpersonal and organizational ties was further evidenced by social network analysis, which found that the majority of foreign fighters were linked within a single social network prior to their mobilization. Overall, the findings document the continued relevance of religious organizations in the recruitment and mobilization of jihadi foreign fighters.

Qualitative interviews were conducted with nine members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al‐Qaeda currently incarcerated in Kuwait's Central Prison. The semistructured interviews attempted to understand psychosocial factors in Kuwait that contributed to their decision to join extremist organizations. Interviews were analyzed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and the emergent themes identified the following core themes explaining their involvement: (1) religious identity development; (2) personal connections; (3) propaganda; (4) defense of Islam; and (5) social marginalization. Participants described a process whereby their religion became a central part of their personal identity. As their religious identity developed, they became involved in Islamic organizations where they met people involved with ISIS or Al‐Qaeda. These social connections exposed them to jihadi propaganda which, in addition to increased military conflict in the Middle East, crystallized their beliefs that Islam is under attack, and they were religiously obligated to defend it. The results also identified societal factors that increased the probability of engaging in terrorism including relatively low levels of education, coming from low socioeconomic groups in Kuwait, and feeling socially marginalized by broader Kuwaiti society.

Why has transnational war volunteering increased so dramatically in the Muslim world since 1980? Standard explanations, which emphasize U. S.-Saudi support for the 1980s Afghan mujahideen, the growth of Islamism, or the spread of Wahhabism are insufficient. The increase in transnational war volunteering is better explained as the product of a pan-Islamic identity movement that grew strong in the 1970s Arab world from elite competition among exiled Islamists in international Islamic organizations and Muslim regimes. Seeking political relevance and increased budgets, Hijaz-based international activists propagated an alarmist discourse about external threats to the Muslim nation and established a global network of Islamic charities. This \"soft\" pan-Islamic discourse and network enabled Arabs invested in the 1980s Afghanistan war to recruit fighters in the name of inter-Muslim solidarity. The Arab-Afghan mobilization in turn produced a foreign fighter movement that still exists today, as a phenomenon partly distinct from al-Qaida. The analysis relies on a new data set on foreign fighter mobilizations, rare sources in Arabic, and interviews with former activists.

To this date, there are no instances of peace agreements signed by armed groups affiliated with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State (IS). Previous research has highlighted their transnational demands and their integration into a transnational organization as major obstacles. Yet, these groups are also deeply embedded within local conflict configurations. This article posits that to explore prospects for future negotiations with these groups, one must obtain a better understanding of how they function on the ground. A descriptive empirical analysis is provided of two dimensions of ‘transnationalization’ that should both have an impact on jihadist affiliate groups’ willingness to enter negotiations: transnational operations and transnational recruitment. The analysis of a sample of twenty jihadist affiliate groups in the period 2018–2020 reveals substantial variation regarding both variables. The results should have relevance for both researchers and policymakers seeking to identify nonviolent containment strategies in armed conflicts with rebel groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and IS.

This article studies the Islamic State’s only remaining periodical, Al-Naba, identifying the most common tropes and patterns in the periodical’s Sub-Saharan Africa coverage, and on Mozambique in particular. The Islamic State’s increasingly important coverage of Africa focuses on terror attacks, military campaigns and on the fight against Christianity. However, it also employs more traditional anti-colonial arguments that have been used by other, more accepted, political actors during the struggle for decolonisation. Al-Naba also functions as a ‘shamer’ of non-African Muslims, to get them to join jihad by pointing to the African successes of the organisation and set these successes up as examples to be followed. In this sense, the article illustrates how African jihadist branches can have global agency.

This article explores the role of a spiritual punishment unique to Islam, the punishment of the grave, in motivating jihadi terrorism. It argues that the exemption from this spiritual punishment granted to jihadi martyrs may be a ‘pull’ factor in the radicalisation of some Muslims. To date the punishment of the grave has been discussed only in passing in the research literature on jihadist radicalisation. To address the resultant gap in our knowledge, this article describes the concept, documents its neglect in the study of jihadist radicalisation, investigates the prevalence of this concern amongst believers, ranging from the nominally affiliated to violent extremists, and the use of the concept by prominent jihadist figures and organisations to attract and train new martyrs. Arguing that a concern with the punishment of the grave is a crucial but overlooked aspect of the heightened religiosity — and based on its expression perhaps uniquely instrumental in identifying believers left with limited options, including violence — the article advocates recognising it as a significant and useful additional marker of radicalisation, especially in the context of prisons. Increased awareness of the concept and the extraordinary fear it often generates will help to better attune strategies used to prevent and deradicalise individuals to the religious struggles driving some Muslims to sacrifice their lives in lethal acts of terrorism.

Terrorism studies is fascinated with the terrorist actor. Though this may seem natural, the present article argues that a different perspective can be fruitful. From a constructivist point of view, terrorism is a social construction. The terrorist actor is a product of discourse, and hence discourse is the logical starting point for terrorism research. In particular, it is the discourse of the terrorists' adversaries that constitutes terrorist motivations, strategies, organizational structures and goals. Hence, the article suggests a shift of perspective in terrorism studies – from an actor-centred to a discourse-centred perspective. It develops a discourse approach that emphasizes the crucial role of metaphors in the making of reality. To illustrate this approach, the metaphorical construction of Al-Qaeda in the German popular press in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington (2001), Madrid (2004) and London (2005) is analysed. Terrorism was first constituted as war, but from 2004 onwards the principal metaphor shifted from war to crime, constructing Al-Qaeda as a criminal rather than a military organization. This shift has transformed Al-Qaeda from an external to an internal threat, which has entailed a shift in counter-terrorism practices from a military to a judicial response.

The practice of bay’ah (the taking of an oath of allegiance) is one of the classic procedures for formalizing relations between individuals or organizations in the Muslim world. The concept has become fundamentally important within the global jihadi movement and is a key element for understanding the establishment and development of different allegiances between the various actors that currently form the movement. Through the use of bay’ah, the two main Salafi-jihadist organizations, al-Qaeda (AQ) and Islamic State (IS), have achieved a global expansion after establishing allegiance relationships with dozens of groups around the world. For this reason, it is important to analyze how this mechanism functions and how it is instrumentalized.

Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan was raided following his death in 2011. The documents retrieved from his compound became known as the Abbottabad Compound Material (ACM). The majority of ACM documents were declassified and released to the public in 2017. However, these documents have not been thoroughly mined by academic researchers despite potentially important information that may exist in the ACM. Academic researchers may be deterred from using the ACM because the documents are not easily accessible or because the documents are predominantly in Arabic. This paper presents a search engine specifically built for researchers that will enable the mining of ACM documents. The ACM search tool may facilitate critical terrorism- and extremism-related research related to al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups.