Why They Join: Pathways into Indonesian Jihadist Organizations

ABSTRACT

Why do Indonesian Muslims join Islamist extremist groups? This article explores four pathways to entry into Indonesian militant groups: study sessions, local conflict, kinship, and schools. It argues that within all four of these pathways, social bonds and relationships are the common thread in encouraging entry as well as in fostering commitment. Specifically, these relationships contribute to the formation and eventual consolidation of one’s identity as a member of the jihadi group through regular participation in activities, attending meetings, narrowing the circle of friends to those within the group, and participating in increasingly risky and possibly violent activities together. Drawing on original fieldwork including 49 interviews with current and former members of Jemaah Islamiyah, Mujahidin KOMPAK, Darul Islam, Mujahidin Tanah Runtuh, Indonesia’s pro-ISIS network, and other jihadist groups as well as 57 depositions and court documents, this article explores the development and evolution of these pathways and how relational ties play a role in each.     

A Social Movement Theory Typology of Militant Organisations: Contextualising Terrorism

Typologies are ubiquitous in terrorism studies, illustrating their continued appeal as a tool to further our understanding of this form of political violence. Despite this, to date, the promise of an empirically derived typology has largely been neglected. In addressing this gap, this article sets out a typology developed from Social Movement Theory. Using a novel statistical technique to derive a three-dimensional framework for categorising militant groups, the typology incorporates both organisational characteristics and the wider political context. The result is a typology defined by three conceptual constructs: political capacity, war-making capacity, and network capacity. Alongside these organisational features, imposing measures of the wider political opportunity structure reveals eight types of militant organisation. To explore the utility of the framework, a preliminary analysis interprets the typology in light of the presence of wider conflict. That a robust relationship is found between the various types and whether groups were operating in peacetime, civil war, or low-intensity conflict, goes some way to demonstrating its utility as an analytical tool. Conclusions draw attention to the importance of contextualising militant groups in their socio-political setting, and the benefits of combining theory alongside empirical analysis to develop robust characterisations of violent organisations.     

Fighting the Jihad of the Pen: Countering Revolutionary Islam's Ideology

Al Qaeda's ideology is not new; their critique of the existing political and social order and vision for how to redeem the Muslim world builds on preexisting arguments of several 20th century predecessors who called for an Islamic revolution that would create a new order based on Islam. The persistence of revolutionary Islam suggests that these ideas need to be countered in order to strike at the root of the problem driving Islamically motivated terrorism and insurgency. U.S. efforts to defeat Al Qaeda, however, continue to focus primarily on killing or capturing the leadership, interdicting operations, and defensively bolstering the homeland and U.S. assets against various types of attacks. In order to confront Al Qaeda's ideology, U.S. efforts should focus on indirectly fostering “a market place of ideas”—the space and culture of questioning and debating—in order to challenge the grievances and solutions proposed by revolutionary Islam.     

Analysing labels,associations, and sentiments in Twitter on the Abu Sayyaf kidnapping of Viktor Okonek

This article investigates Twitter data related to the kidnapping case of two German nationals in the southern region of the Philippines by the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG). It explores perceptions of the ASG, along with associated organizations and sentiments indicated in the tweets together with statistically significant relationships. Findings revealed that: “Rebel” and “Militant” were the most frequently used labels for the ASG; a majority of the tweets contained sentiments that assess threats such as abduction and kidnapping of hostages; and almost half contained words that indicate negotiation or concession to the demands of the captors. Logistic regression analyses on “Rebel” and “Islamist” revealed positive coefficients for these sentiments used as predictors. This meant that people who assessed threats and expressed sentiments that responders should concede to the captors’ demands were more likely to use the “Rebel” or “Islamist” labels. Rather than the two longstanding dominant narratives of the ASG as terrorists and criminals, the emerging rebel and militant labels suggest a more domestically and politically sensitive Twitter commentary than is represented in the work of the Al-Qaeda-centric paradigm exponents. These findings, along with the complex associated political and policy contexts and implications, are discussed in this article.     

Good radicals? Trajectories of pro-Kurdish political and militant mobilisation to the wars in Syria,Turkey and Iraq

ABSTRACT

This article explores the interrelation of volunteering, violence and ideology by studying the pro-Kurdish political and militant mobilisation to the wars in Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Focusing especially on the trajectories, motives and reflections of foreign volunteers in different Kurdish militant groups, I argue that ideology is neither a precondition nor a necessary reason for mobilisation to an armed group. In many cases, it is the other way around, as mobilisation to violence is often the source of ideological conviction.     

Leadership Matters: The Effects of Targeted Killings on Militant Group Tactics

Targeted killings have become a central component of counterterrorism strategy. In response to the unprecedented prevalence of this strategy around the world, numerous empirical studies have recently examined whether “decapitating” militant groups with targeted killings is strategically effective. This study builds on that research program by examining the impact of targeted killings on militant group tactical decision-making. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in the attack patterns of militant groups conditional on whether a government’s targeted killing attempt succeeded against them operationally. In both the Afghanistan-Pakistan and Israel-West Bank-Gaza Strip theaters, targeted killings significantly alter the nature of militant group violence. When their leaderships are degraded with a successful strike, militant groups become far less discriminate in their target selection by redirecting their violence from military to civilian targets. We then analyze several potential causal mechanisms to account for these results and find strongest evidence that targeted killings tend to promote indiscriminate organizational violence by empowering lower level members with weaker civilian restraint.     

Banning political parties in a democratic constitutional state: the second NPD ban proceedings in a comparative perspective

ABSTRACT

Backes’s article discusses the judgement of the Second Senate of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) of 17 January 2017—not to ban the right-wing extremist party Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD)—in light of recent lively international debates on the protection of democracy. It considers the logic of an examination of proportionality as established by German constitutional law, considering aspects of the legitimacy, suitability, necessity and appropriateness of the party ban. The article shows that the newly introduced criterion of ‘potentiality’ requires an examination of proportionality even if the court itself denies this. Thus the threshold for intervention has been raised, moderately, since a concrete or even immediate threat as defined in police law is not required. The Court links the definition of a free democratic basic order more closely to the established minimum definitions of comparative research and provides clarification that further refutes the (exaggerated) accusation of ‘vagueness’. In doing so it has sharpened the contours of the concept of militant democracy that is widely regarded in international comparative studies.     

Prisoners and Politics: Western Hostage Taking by Militant Groups

Hostage taking of Westerners by militant groups has increased since 9/11. Despite this rising problem, there has been little academic research on how a hostage’s individual characteristics influence the outcome of the incident. Using a newly collected dataset of over 1,000 individuals taken hostage in incidents involving terrorist groups since 2001, this article evaluates how individual, national, and group characteristics influence the likelihood that hostage incidents end with the release or execution of the hostage. The findings show that a hostage’s nationality and occupation are significant individual-level drivers of outcomes, while the nature of the militant group itself also matters.