Family and Jihadism

A Socio-Anthropological Approach to the French Experience

Jérôme Ferret, Farhad Khosrokhavar, Jérôme Ferret, Farhad Khosrokhavar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032073460
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000516685
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores the paramount importance of family to jihadism in France, Spain and in Europe more generally. In France, special focus is given to the Mohammed Merah paradigmatic case study in the Toulouse region. In Spain, attention is given to the North and to Catalonia. With attention to both the concrete family - often in crisis - and the imaginary family invented by radicalized youth to substitute, this book shows the fundamental need among many jihadists to reconstitute the family, whether in the form of a clan or the imagined Caliphate (or neo-Ummah): a form of shared existence that offers escape from societies in which jihadists feel ill-at-ease. Demonstrating the failure of an emphasis on the individual actor to capture the meaning of jihadism, Family and Jihadism reveals the fundamental importance to our understanding of jihadist activity of the family (in an extended anthropological sense) - real or imagined - into which the individual is inserted. A study of the crisis of family and the re-creation of a new, enlarged family in the lives of young jihadists, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, politics and security studies with interests in radicalisation, political violence, social movements and religious violence.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• 1. French jihadism and the family: Hypothesis and presentation of the fields studied
• 2. The ‘Merah clan’: family trajectories and transformation of the economy of violence
• 3. Artigat or the imaginary neo-Umma
• 4. Charisma of action, mystical charisma, neo-Umma source of European Jihadism. The example of Toulouse and its region
• 5. New fraternal scenes and jihadist violence, Ripoll (Catalonia, northern Spain)
• 6. The rise and fall of a jihadist neo-family: The Cannes-Torcy cell
• 7. The jihadist commitment as a solution to the impasses of family transmissions
• 8. Jihadism and the family: A heuristic model questioned, energised and augmented
• Appendix
• Index