Abstract Since 9/11, states around the world have engaged in efforts to counter the so-called terrorist threat. Besides neo-colonial military projects, this has manifested itself in a mushrooming of laws, policies, and practices in the realm of counterterrorism, and an explosion of research into terrorism, extremism, and radicalisation. In this chapter, drawing on my experiences…
Category: Publications
Leaving peace for war: An exploratory study of Swiss men’s trajectories toward engagement in Arab conflicts
While the issue of foreign fighting has been very present in Swiss public discourse in recent years, little is known about the actual trajectories of young men who engage in this particular form of political violence. Based primarily on face-to-face in-depth interviews with four Swiss male nationals who travelled to conflict zones in the Arab…
Politico-ideological violence in Lebanon: The narrative embeddedness of grievances
1 Introduction Grievance-based violence comes in many forms. The phenomenon labelled variably as terrorism, political violence, or violent extremism is one of them. Scholarship in this field has for years pointed to the importance of grievances in the process towards violent action, yet in-depth engagement with grievances is only starting to pick up. This special issue…
‘Yes, security, there is security. But other than that, nothing.’: An empirical inquiry into the ‘everyday (in)security’ of Syrian and Iraqi urban refugees in Jordan
Ahmed Ajil[1], Manon Jendly[2], Claudia Campistol Mas[3] Scholarship on security has recently seen a shift from traditionally state-centric, elitist and objectivist conceptions of ‘security’ towards human-centred perspectives which put emphasis on forms of ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ security, and promote bottom-up empirical inquiries to further our understand of what security looks like ‘from below’. There remains, however,…
Interviewing activists and terrorists: a detailed research protocol
In the domain of PVE as well as reintegration, the most interesting studies are arguably based on material collected first-hand from the individuals involved in the phenomenon of political violence or terrorism. As more individuals from the 2013-2016 wave of foreign terrorist fighters are exiting the criminal justice system, young individuals with no memory of…
Studying Terror Through my I’s: Autoethnographic Insider/Outsider Reflections of an Arab-Muslim Researcher
Abstract The phenomena referred to as terrorism and political violence have become a major object of academic interest over the past two decades. While the lack of first-hand data collection has been criticised, a growing number of researchers are conducting field research and interviews with individuals involved in these phenomena. Among those, there are scholars with ethnic,…
Der al-Muhaysini Komplex: Vom Propagieren der Propaganda von Propagandisten
Dieser Beitrag analysiert die Verurteilung der IZRS-Vorstandsmitglieder wegen Verstosses gegen Art. 2 Abs. 1 des AQ/IS-Gesetzes. Durch die Produktion und Bewerbung eines Interviews mit dem geistigen Führer der syrischen Jaysh al-Fath und eines Dokumentarfilms tätigten sie vorsätzlich Al-Qaida-Propaganda. Ziel des Beitrags ist es, die mit dem Erstarken des Terrorismuspräventionsparadigmas vorangetriebene Verschiebung in den präventivstrafrechtlichen Bereich…
Politico-ideological violence: Zooming in on grievances
Most studies on politico-ideological violence (PIV) recognize the importance of socio-political and economic grievances, but they rarely analyse them in depth. I argue that this is symptomatic of a tendency of depoliticization in radicalization research in the post 9/11 context and suggest that the study of PIV may benefit from putting greater emphasis on the…
Fabriquer un dangereux ennemi terroriste: une étude de cas suisse sur les implications d’une prophétie
« Parfois, je commence à avoir peur de moi-même. S’ils me voient tous comme un tel danger… le suis-je ? » (Sami) Introduction Au milieu des années 2000, la « guerre contre le terrorisme » (Global War on Terror), d’abord très offensive et tournée vers l’extérieur, se déplace progressivement et plus insidieusement vers la sphère intérieure. Les attentats de Londres (2005)…
Politico-ideological violence and mobilisation in the Arab World: All in (Routledge, 2023)
This book presents a study of politico-ideological mobilisation and violence by focusing on the life stories, trajectories and narratives of individuals who mobilised for causes and conflicts in the Arab World. It provides a greater understanding of the biographical, sociological, political and historic factors pertinent for their radicalisation processes. What makes individuals identify with suffering…