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how millennials imagine jihad; how they feel about being Jewish-Israeli; and how they ‘became hiloni ’? The chapter touches briefly on the question of hiloni millennial attitudes to Palestinians, and the ways in which these do or do not problematize stereotypes. But that is a topic which demands further, deeper research. This chapter digs below the surface of Western stereotypes of religious ‘fanaticism’. William Cavanaugh argued that, as Western, liberal democracies evolved, they developed a powerful myth that ‘religion’ is inherently violent and needs to be
Few social and political phenomena have been debated as frequently or fervidly as neoliberalism and neo-jihadism. Yet, while discourse on these phenomena has been wide-ranging, they are rarely examined in relation to one another. In response, Neoliberalism and neo-jihadism examines political-economic characteristics of twentieth and early twenty-first-century neo-jihadism. Drawing on Bourdieusian and neo-Marxist ideas, it investigates how the neo-jihadist organisations, Al Qaeda and Islamic State, engage with the late modern capitalist paradigm of neoliberalism in their anti-capitalist propaganda and quasi-capitalist financial practices. An investigation of documents and discourses reveals interactions between neoliberalism and neo-jihadism characterised by surface-level contradiction, and structural connections that are dialectical and mutually reinforcing. Neoliberalism here is argued to constitute an underlying ‘status quo’, while neo-jihadism, as an evolving form of political organisation, is perpetuated as part of this situation.
Representing differentiated, unique, and exclusive examples of the (r)evolutionary phenomenon of neo-jihadism, AQ and IS are demonstrated in Neoliberalism and neo-jihadism to be characteristic of the mutually constitutive nature of ‘power and resistance’. Just as resistance movements throughout modern history have ended up resembling the forms of power they sought to overthrow, so too have AQ and IS ended up resembling and reconstituting the dominant political-economic paradigm of neoliberalism they mobilised in response to.
: Security Issues and Practices in an MSF Mission in the Land of Jihad ’, in Neuman , M. and Weissman , F. (eds), Saving Lives and Staying Alive: Humanitarian Security in the Age of Risk Management ( London : Hurst ), pp. 109 – 26 . South , A
understand elites to be individuals with the power to make decisions that affect populations. 7 Personal communication with authors of the Kasai, DRC case study. Works Cited Ahmed , A. ( 2017 ), Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power ( New York
The contemporary type of political violence sometimes referred to as ‘neo-jihadism’ developed in a dialectical, political-economic relationship with its US-directed military and counterterrorist opposition. While the neo-jihadist organisations, Al Qaeda (AQ) and Islamic State (IS), have since their inception propagandised on the basis of widespread anti-capitalist sentiments, at the same time they exploit and contribute to the mechanisms of neoliberal and late modern capitalist finance they condemn. The nature of the dialectic between AQ, IS, and their US
On 7 September 2014, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the right-wing Hindu body, widely regarded as the parent organisation of Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party of India, published cover stories on ‘love jihad’ in its weekly mouthpieces Panchjanya , in Hindi, and Organiser , in English. ‘Love jihad’ was alleged to be a conspiracy under which Muslim men were targeting vulnerable Hindu girls and forcefully converting them to Islam by feigning love through trickery and marriage. The publications urged people to raise the slogan ‘Love ever
The cases in Neoliberalism and neo-jihadism have revealed ideological and material ways in which AQ and IS engage with the political-economic paradigm of neoliberalism. While campaigning on the basis of culturally prevalent anti-capitalist sentiments, these organisations raise and manage funds by exploiting the apparatus and affordances of neoliberal political-economic systems. Although AQ and IQ are exclusive examples of the (r)evolutionary phenomenon of neo-jihadism, they are both characteristic of the mutually constitutive nature of power and resistance
This book retraces the human and intellectual development that has led the author to one very firm conviction: that the tensions that afflict the Western world’s relationship with the Muslim world are at their root political, far more than they are ideological. It aims to limit itself to a precise scholarly arena: recounting, as meticulously as possible, the most striking interactions between a personal life history and professional and research trajectories. This path has consistently centered on how the rise of political Islam has been expressed: first in the Arab world, then in its interactions with French and Western societies, and finally in its interactions with other European and Western societies. It brings up-to-date theses formulated in the 2000s, in particular in the author’s previous book Islamism in the Shadow of al-Qaeda (2005, 2nd ed. 2010, English ed. 2010), by measuring them up against the lessons of the powerful revolutionary dynamics set off by the “Arab Spring” of 2011, followed by the counter-revolutionary ones.
AQ’s targeting of the New York World Trade Center and Washington Pentagon on 9/11 marked a watershed moment in public and political understandings of the phenomenon of neo-jihadism. While Al Qaeda and the ideological movement with which it was associated were in many contexts perceived as a civilisational threat ( Ali 2003 ; Dreyfuss 2006 ), the symbolic nature of 9/11 and its propagandised after-effects also drew attention to neo-jihadism’s political-economic dimensions. Some explored how the relative meaning of image-based propaganda is integral to the
Dialectical engagements between neoliberalism and neo-jihadism correspond to a history of Western economic development and to neoliberal philosophies and policies that have yielded undesirable social, political, and economic outcomes. In this chapter, I outline a number of philosophies and policies that are subject to widespread criticism and that have been variously intersectional with the GWOT and neo-jihadism. Superficial contradictions in the political economy of neo-jihadist organisations’ propaganda and practice are apparent, and neoliberalism also