Manni Crone

Homegrown Terrorism in the West

The London bombings in 2005 led to the perception that the terrorist threat had changed from external to internal. This became conceptualized shortly after as “homegrown terrorism.” This article deals with the meaning and scope of this phenomenon. We begin by tracing an ambiguity in the term “homegrown,” which is both about belonging in the West and autonomy from terrorist groups abroad. A quantitative study of Islamist terrorism in the West since 1989 reveals an increase in both internal and autonomous terrorism since 2003 and that most plots are now internal—but not autonomous. Finally we suggest that an increase in autonomous terrorism is a transitory phenomenon.

Radicalization revisited: violence, politics and the skills of the body

For more than a decade, ‘radicalization’ has been a keyword in our understanding of terrorism. From the outset, radicalization was conceived of as an intellectual process through which an individual would increasingly come under a spell of extremist ideas. This ideological understanding of radicalization still prevails. In a 2015 speech on extremism, British Prime Minister David Cameron, for instance, claimed that the ‘root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself’. But the way we understand radicalization has specific consequences for the way we manage and fight the scourge of terrorism. Considering recent events, including the November 2015 Paris attacks, the present article sets out to reassess the above-mentioned intellectualist understanding of radicalization and come up with new suggestions as to how radicalization may be understood today. Initially, the article suggests that ideology is not necessarily a precondition for violence, but that a prior experience with violence is more often a precondition for engaging an extremist ideology. Such experience with violence can be both domestic and international, obtained in Europe or Syria and other conflict zones. In the second part of the article it is argued that although radicalization is often conceived of as an individual process, pathways towards terrorism are inherently social and political. Finally, the article argues that by stressing the importance of ideology and ideological processes, concepts of radicalization have abstracted away from another factor that is pivotal for understanding pathways towards terrorist violence: the skills and capacities of the body.

Religion and Violence: Governing Muslim Militancy through Aesthetic Assemblages

One of the ways in which the relationship between religion and violence has been conceptualized is through the concept of “radicalization”. In the wake of the London bombings, “radicalization” became a favored policy term that was reinvented in order to manage and prevent the new phenomenon of “homegrown terrorism”. Around 2005, it was a widespread assumption that “homegrown terrorism” had a religious dimension, and the concept of “radicalization” therefore had to articulate how religion and terrorism were related. Most concepts of radicalization describe a cognitive transformation, where the progressive adoption of radical religious ideology is the first step in a process that— eventually—could lead to terrorism. The argument that religion and violence are connected through intellectual processes can also be found in academic literature. Max Weber, who studied the relation between religion and practice, famously argued that a specific Weltanschauung—a protestant ethics—was paving the way for an ascetic practice that contributed to the growth of capitalism.1 More precisely, it was a specific interpretation or rationalization of religious dogma (the idea of predestination) that subsequently made religious actors act in specific ways. Weber’s influence on the study of religion before and after 9/11 cannot be overestimated. Recently, Cecelia Lynch has proposed a neo-Weberian model of how to understand the relationship between religion and violence. “(W)e must first assess”, she writes, “what religious guidelines suggest for particular situations, and then look more deeply into how religious actors interpret those guidelines – how they bridge the gap

Review Essay: Dusting for Fingerprints: The Aarhus Approach to Islamism

This article reviews the Aarhus approach to the study of Islamism as presented in a series of articles by Mehdi Mozaffari and Tina Magaard. The core contribution of the Aarhus approach—the argument that islamism constitutes yet another form of totalitarianism—is found to be forceful and thought-provoking. The academic utility of this approach is difficult to evaluate, however, since empirical evidence in the form of structured comparisons is not provided. This is partly due to the lack of a definition of totalitarianism to facilitate comparisons with Nazism, Fascism and Stalinism, and partly due to a lack of interest in comparisons along other relevant dimensions, including manifestations of radicalized/securitized religion drawing on the vocabulary of religious traditions other than Islam. It is argued that the definition of Islamism as totalitarianism is upheld by methodologically privileging texts over practice and definitional claims over empirical evidence. As such, the approach reflects an anthropological and sociological deficit excluding analyses of practices from textual reading and a hermeneutical deficit excluding various existing interpretations. Most importantly, these criteria for demarcating Islamism have important consequences for security political strategies for uncoupling the relations between Islamism and violence.

Introduction: On Sacred or Secular Grounds and How Would We Know?

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11 2001 had a grave impact on the way the conflict dynamics in world politics have been shaped, structured and interpreted since then. The invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), the US drone programs launched during the first decade of the 00’s in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia and the more recent interventions in Libya (2011), and Mali (2013) have all at some point been related to the concern of combatting international terrorism. To fight or prevent international terrorism still appears as a top-priority for the great powers of the West and questions about the role of religion in explaining the motivations and occurrences of terrorist acts still remain topical. The shockwaves that went through the world in the wake of the 2001 assaults on US territory also influenced the way we as scholars began to look at the world. While blackand-white enemy images were inflated on the political stages portraying the perpetrators and their co-ideologists as nothing less than devilish, in academia the event also created a momentum for revisiting the conceptual schemes that we often use to make sense of the world and human behavior. Scholars of international relations were particularly affected by the event, since it strongly pushed religion into their eyesight – a category that had never made it into the mainstream of scholarly attention on par with the IR disciplines’ central concepts such as power, sovereignty, national interest etc. The scholarly attention was also drawn by the fact that in many European countries as well as in the US the new threat from religious extremists, Muslim fanatics and fundamentalists was debated fiercely and the role of religion or excessive religion became part of both domestic

ER ISLAMISK SEKULARISME EN SELVMODSIGELSE

European societies are becoming still more “postsecular” and we therefore need to gain a much more subtle understanding of what secularism is. This also implies understanding non-European apprehensions of this concept, and in many Muslim countries secularism is a burning issue. Can Islam be secularized? In what way should religion, law and politics be separated? This article presents the thought of the Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Sorush and the Sudanese human rights expert Abdullahi An-Naim. According to Sorush and An-Naim, religion and secularism are not incompatible opposites, but rather interdependent elements. An-Naim even suggests that we understand secularism not as the separation between religion and state, but rather as a specific relationship between them.