Radicalization

Kevin McDonald

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509522613, 9781509522606
• eBook ISBN: 9781509522644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

From Paris to San Bernardino, Barcelona to Manchester, home-grown terrorism is among the most urgent challenges confronting Western nations. Attempts to understand jihadism have typically treated it as a form of political violence or religious conflict. However, the closer we get to the actual people involved in radicalization, the more problematic these explanations become.

In this fascinating book, Kevin McDonald shows that the term radicalization unifies what are in fact very different experiences. These new violent actors, whether they travelled to Syria or killed at home, range from former drug dealers and gang members to students and professionals, mothers with young children and schoolgirls. This innovative book sets out to explore radicalization not as something done to people but as something produced by active participants, attempting to make sense of themselves and their world. In doing so, McDonald offers powerful portraits of the immersive worlds of social media so fundamental to present-day radicalization.

Radicalization offers a bold new way of understanding the contemporary allure of jihad and, in the process, important directions in responding to it.

1
Rethinking Radicalization

In 2012, Aqsa Mahmood was an 18-year-old living with her parents in a middle-class suburb of Glasgow, Scotland. She had completed secondary school and was making plans for the university course she would begin in the autumn. Like many young people in Europe and North America, much of her social life with her friends took place through social media. She created her first Twitter account in 2010, tweeting approximately thirty times a day, most exchanges being with a close group of friends, her ‘fam’. In 2012, she created her first ask.fm account, and in it we encounter the kind of communications we would expect of an 18-year-old: chatting about her former school, her suburb, expressing pleasure at receiving compliments. She is integrated into her community; she shares opinions about local cricket teams, and her pride in the kilt that was part of her school uniform, declaring ‘I’m a true Scot’ (ask.fm, 13 August 2012). In November, she is tweeting pictures of steamy male film stars to her girlfriends, and screenshots of her mum’s attempts to get her to pick up the phone when she calls (Twitter, 27 November 2012).

Just one year later, Aqsa Mahmood left her home in Glasgow to travel to Aleppo in Syria, where she became part of what was then known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham, or ISIS. There she took on an active role offering advice and strategies to other young women in the United Kingdom about how to travel successfully to Syria. On 28 September 2015, less than two years after her departure, she was deemed of sufficient importance to be added to the list of individuals subject to United Nations Security Council sanctions, named as an individual actively involved in promoting al-Qaeda-linked terrorism. This book sets out to understand how such a transformation, and others like it, is possible.

Violence, emergency, uncertainty

Aqsa Mahmood is only one of more than five thousand people estimated to have travelled from the industrialized democracies of Europe, North America and the Pacific to join jihadist groups in Syria during the period 2012 to 2017 (Europol 2017). This number reached a peak in 2016, and then began to decline as western governments made travel to Syria more difficult, and as the Islamic State began to suffer defeats and loss of territory, ultimately leading to the loss of Raqqa, its capital in Northern Syria, in October 2017. Like the majority of people who travelled to Syria during this time, Mahmood was young, the average age of those making this journey being under 25 (Europol 2017). This is very different from the age profile of those who a generation earlier travelled to join in the Afghan and Balkan wars, where the age of the majority who made this journey was over thirty. And Mahmood is not only young, but a woman, again reflecting a major transformation from two decades earlier, where those who travelled to Afghanistan were almost uniquely men.

During this period, a new potential for violence was not only evident in the numbers of people travelling to Syria. Attacks occurred across Europe, from driving vehicles into crowds and stabbings to the organized attacks in Paris in November 2015, which killed 150 and injured hundreds. Several months later there was an attack at Brussels Airport and then one on France’s Bastille Day when a refrigerated lorry ran into crowds in the Riviera city of Nice, killing 86 and injuring more than four hundred. In the United Kingdom, attacks had also taken place, including a college student of Libyan origin who blew himself up with a shrapnel-filled bomb at a concert in Manchester, killing 22 people, mainly teenage girls and children. Such violence has not been confined to Europe. In the United States in 2009, a shooter killed 13 people at the Fort Worth military base and wounded a further twenty-nine. In December 2015, 14 people were killed in a shooting in San Bernadino and, in June 2016, 49 people were killed and a further 53 wounded at an LGTB nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where the killer claimed allegiance to the Islamic State. At that time, this was the largest mass killing in modern American history, and it remains the largest killing of LGTB people since the Nazi Holocaust. In September 2016, three bombs exploded in the New York City area, wounding some thirty people and, a year later in October, a 29-year-old man drove a truck down a bicycle path in Manhattan, hitting cyclists, pedestrians and a school bus, killing eight people and wounding many more. Similar radicalized violence has also emerged in Canada and Australia, including attacks with vehicles, shootings, attempted use of explosives and stabbings of police.

It is important to recognize that the scale of this violence is dwarfed by violence taking place in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia or Libya. But these countries are all experiencing modern forms of warfare involving collapsed or compromised states, where regular military forces merge with militias, criminal groups, families and individuals, and where once clearly defined fields of battle have given way to pervasive and increasingly chaotic violence (McDonald 2013). This is not the case in Europe, North America or the industrialized countries of the Pacific.

What is striking across all these actions is the diversity of those involved. Many are very young, such as the 15-year-old schoolboy without any background of violence who, in October 2015, shot and killed a police employee in Sydney, Australia, or three schoolgirls from London who travelled to Syria in that same year. Others have backgrounds ranging from drug dealers and gang members to students and professionals or mothers with young children. This diversity has been the source of a new kind of uncertainty, a sense of disorientation and insecurity, the sense that we are living in a world that is less and less intelligible, and so less secure.

Political violence?

Interviewer:	What is jihad?
Al-Mazwagi:	Jihad is ah …, ah jihad means to ah … what’s the word I’m looking for?
Interviewer:	Struggle?
Al-Mazwagi:	No, no, no, not struggle … But to kick some butt! [giggles] Jihad is to kick Obama’s … [laughs, then pauses]. What’s that word? There’s a word [longer pause] Yeah, ok, jihad is to spend all your time and effort in fighting the enemies of Allah SWT’. (Ibrahim al-Mazwagi, North Syria, January 2013 (Channel 4, United Kingdom)

Ibrahim al-Mazwagi, aged 21, was the first British fighter to be killed in the Syrian civil war in February 2013. A university graduate who grew up in London, he had travelled to Syria a year earlier and joined the Katiba al Muhajireen, a brigade of foreign fighters that would eventually become part of the Islamic State. In the exchange above, he is searching to find the words to answer ‘What is jihad?’. To help out, the interviewer suggests ‘struggle’. Al-Mazwagi rejects this, and continues searching for a word that eludes him. Suddenly his eyes light up and he smiles; he’s found what he’s looking for: kick some butt. Laughing with relief and pleasure, he adds that it is Obama’s butt to be kicked. He then pauses for several seconds, becomes more serious and offers another answer, this time with much less inflection or expression. It is as if he is repeating something that he has learnt by heart. Later in the same exchange, the interviewer asks him why he has come to Syria. Al-Mazwagi responds: ‘Well, I’ve always known about jihad, seen the Mujahideen on TV and everything.’

This brief exchange opens up questions that will be central to this book. Al-Mazwagi offers what amounts to two accounts of what jihad means. His first answer is to ‘kick some butt’ which he refines as ‘Obama’s butt’. In this short phrase, al-Mazwagi summarizes one of the major approaches to jihadism within the social sciences today: jihad is political violence. He expresses a widely held view of the motivations behind jihadist violence, often associated with liberal or progressive observers. From this perspective, jihadist violence is a response to external events or actors. This kind of analysis is associated with influential scholars, such as the linguist and commentator on American foreign policy Noam Chomsky, who argues that terrorism needs to be fundamentally understood as a response to United States’ actions. For Chomsky, the appeal of terrorism is ‘primarily among young people who live under conditions of repression and humiliation, with little hope and little opportunity, and who seek some goal in life that offers dignity and self-realization; in this case, establishing a utopian Islamic state rising in opposition to centuries of subjugation and destruction by Western imperial power’ (Polychroniou and Chomsky 2015). This is a view widely defended by violent actors themselves. Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both converts to Islam, murdered and then attempted to behead Lee Rigby, an off-duty soldier, as he was crossing a street in London in 2013. Adebolajo asserted to a passer-by who filmed him: ‘The only reason we killed this man … is because Muslims are dying daily… . This British solider is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’

This ‘political violence’ paradigm is arguably most influential in the sub-discipline of terrorism studies that developed in the 1970s, focusing on the militarized groups that emerged following the collapse of the western student movement, such as the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weather Underground in the United States, the Red Army Faction in Germany and more short-lived groups such as the Angry Brigade in the United Kingdom or Action Directe in France (McDonald 2013). In the years since, similarly configured separatist groups have remained a source of violence in Europe, from Corsica to Northern Ireland (Europol 2017). In such cases, violence has been structured by ideology, organization and criminality, framed by what appeared as one of the core beliefs of terrorism studies in the 1980s: ‘terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead’ (Jenkins 1975: 16).

Today’s violence in North America, Europe and the industrialized countries of the Pacific takes on a very different profile. Organized and structured groups have given way to groups of friends, networks or individuals, often linked through social media. And rather than made up primarily of former university students, the new violent actors are much more diverse, with an increasing presence of people with criminal backgrounds. Those who joined violent groups in the 1970s almost always had a previous background in ‘high risk’ activism, often involving confrontations with police, so much so that influential approaches argued that terrorist violence was a product of competitive escalation between police and protesters (Della Porta 2013: 76). But today’s situation is radically different. Rather than a long and increasingly frustrated period of activism, leading eventually to embracing violence, the great majority of today’s violent actors in Europe and North America have no experience in solidarity organizations or political activism of any kind. And increasing numbers embrace jihadist violence not with a background in activism, but from involvement in criminality.

Religious violence?

In [my local] mosque there is not one person with the same mentality as me. I did not learn my jihad from the Aberdeen mosque, I learned it through my own on the Internet or whatever.

Abdul Raqib Amin, North Syria, 2014

In the mid-1990s, international relations scholars such as Samuel Huntington began to argue that, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the older political opposition between capitalism and communism that had dominated much of the twentieth century was giving way to what he saw as a ‘clash of civilizations’. Central to this was what he saw as an emerging opposition between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ (Huntington 1996). From this perspective, after the collapse of communism it would be religion, rather than politics, that would be the source of major world conflicts. Influential sociologists such as Anthony Giddens argued that the pace of globalization had become so great that many people were unable to cope with a world they increasingly experienced as ‘out of control’ (1999: 2). Evoking a kind of ‘strain theory’, Giddens argued that in this world, religion was becoming one of the most important sources of security and certainty, driving what he called the growth of ‘fundamentalism’. Other sociologists also used the term ‘fundamentalism’ to describe what they saw as a new potential for conflict and violence. The American Mark Juergensmeyer argued that religiously inspired social actors were less and less able to compromise with others, considering themselves to be the action of God in the world. Such new religious actors, he argued, were increasingly likely to see the world they were living in shaped by what he called a ‘cosmic war’ (Juergensmeyer 1996).

These views took on immense importance following the attacks of September 11 in 2001, not simply in academic debates, but in programmes seeking to respond to or prevent terrorist-inspired violence. In France, the political scientist Gilles Kepel argues that jihadist movements were a direct consequence of the development of Salafist religious movements in the Middle East (2015). He argues a form of radical Islam has been imported into Europe, and needs to be countered. This influential view has inspired programmes seeking to prevent radicalization through offering classes on the Qur’an and Islamic tradition. From this perspective, practices of religious piety become a source of suspicion.

This new concern with the violent potentials of religion reflects a more profound shift in the social sciences. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the social sciences largely accepted what had come to be known as the ‘secularization’ paradigm, believing that religion would become more personal and have less impact on public life and culture. But from the late twentieth century, confidence in the inevitability of secularization began to wane. Michael Walzer, one of the most important American public intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, captures this new concern when he argues:

I live with a generalized fear of every form of religious militancy. I am afraid of Hindutva zealots in India, messianic Zionists in Israel, and of rampaging Buddhist monks in Myanmar. But I admit that I am most afraid of Islamist zealots because the Islamic world at this moment in time (not always, not forever) is especially feverish and fervent… . politically engaged Islamist zealots can best be understood as today’s crusaders. (Wal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Rethinking Radicalization
• 2 Distant Suffering
• 3 DIY Religion: Hidden Worlds, from Fear to Bliss
• 4 Mediating Violence: Filming the Self
• 5 From Drug Dealer to Jihadist
• 6 The Gamification of Jihad: the Cyber Caliphate
• 7 My Concern is Me
• 8 Radicalization: Experience, Embodiment and Imagination
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement