Contextualising Jihadi Thought

Book excerpt: Global jihadism has been on policy agendas for more than two decades. Recent years have seen an increasing policy focus on countering the ideologies of al-Qaeda and of regional or local militant groups, often lumping them together under the rubric of a single 'global jihadi ideology'. Despite this, studies of jihadi ideas are at a relatively early stage and have yet to fully capture the richness of their wide-ranging social contexts and intellectual universes. This volume aims to address this lacuna at a time when wider currents of jihadi ideology seem poised to eclipse the long-term impacts of the decade-long global 'war of ideas' focused on al-Qaeda. Contextualising Jihadi Thought aims to transcend the dominance of security-studies approaches in the study of militant groups by creating a broader framework for understanding the varied intellectual histories, political engagements and geographies of jihadi ideas. Contributions to the volume span a range of academic disciplines and areas of policy research including history, anthropology, political science, religious studies and area studies. Challenging prevailing policy understandings of a single jihadi ideological narrative, the book's chapters study militant currents of thought and the responses to them in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, South-East Asia and Europe as well as the global contexts within which transnational jihadism has been developed and propagated.