Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Sep 1, 2014
One of the ways in which the relationship between religion and violence has been conceptualized i... more 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
This paper is under review for publication in Terrorism and Political Violence DIIS Working Paper... more This paper is under review for publication in Terrorism and Political Violence DIIS Working Papers make available DIIS researchers' and DIIS project partners' work in progress towards proper publishing. They may include important documentation which is not necessarily published elsewhere. DIIS Working Papers are published under the responsibility of the author alone. DIIS Working Papers should not be quoted without the express permission of the author.
Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, Oct 10, 2006
Abstract This article examines the widespread assumption that Iran today is a theocracy that has ... more Abstract This article examines the widespread assumption that Iran today is a theocracy that has realized a fusion of religion and politics. It argues that the Iranian state today is neither a theocracy nor an Islamic state but a state that to a large extent is ruled according to a ...
European societies are becoming still more “postsecular” and we therefore need to gain a much mor... more 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 ...
For more than a decade, 'radicalization' has been a keyword in public discourse about terrorism. ... more For more than a decade, 'radicalization' has been a keyword in public discourse about terrorism. The attacks in Paris in 2015, in Brussels in 2016, and the large number of people currently travelling from Europe to Syria are some of the latest events that have kept radicalization at the top of the agenda. In July 2015, British Prime Minister David Cameron, for instance, made a speech on extremism in which he emphasized that: 'No one becomes a terrorist from a standing start. It starts with a process of radicalization.' 1 But what is radicalization? What are we talking about when we evoke the topic of radicalization? And how can we understand processes that-eventually-could lead to terrorism? Despite a widespread use of the term, there is no scholarly consensus on how to understand radicalization. This fuzziness, which allows everybody to conceive of radicalization as they like, is not only an intellectual problem of concern for scholars, but also a challenge for practitioners-police, civil servants, intelligence agents, social workers, prison guards, teachers, community workers-who are summoned to manage the phenomenon and communicate their worries about 'weak signals' and 'early signs of radicalization'. What exactly are these people asked to be on the lookout for? Despite the fact that there is no scholarly consensus on how to define radicalization, a set of preconceived ideas about the phenomenon is nonetheless taken for granted in public discourse. It is, for instance, a widely shared idea that Islamist ideology is a key factor in processes of radicalization and, consequently, that prevention should be targeted at extremist ideas, along with radical imams and mosques. But a primary focus on this specific means of understanding radicalization tends to obscure other aspects. One aim of this article is to question the evidence that surrounds the term 'radicalization' and instead turn it into a problem for analysis. The article therefore asks what the currently dominant concepts of radicalization leave out of sight and argues that radicalization is not an individual * Thanks to the journal's anonymous referees for valuable comments on this article. I also wish to thank Suleiman Mourad for inviting me to the Institut d'Études Avancées de Nantes, which offered me the opportunity to write it. Finally I want to thank my colleagues Mona Sheikh, Tobias Gemmerli and Ann-Sophie Hemmingsen for discussing an earlier version of the article.
Far-right parties and pundits are often portrayed as parochial nationalists obsessed with the ide... more Far-right parties and pundits are often portrayed as parochial nationalists obsessed with the idea of national sovereignty. Opposed to a liberal world order, they prefer a rogue world of nation-states on the loose. This essay seeks to complicate that narrative. It suggests that alongside political parties with a nationalist agenda, an increasing number of voices on the radical Right are now pushing for a re-spiritualized world order in which cultures, civilizations, and empires are to set the scene. This vision of global order echoes Christopher Coker’s recent claim that “we now live in a world in which civilization is fast becoming the currency of international politics.” But, why does this strand of the far-right prefer civilizations to nation-states? To ponder this question, this essay zooms in on the European New Right and more precisely two of its main luminaries, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. It shows how the New Right stretches back to classical geopolitics to imagine a future polycentric world order in which large civilizations are set free from American hegemony. The empires of the future are no longer underpinned by nation-states but by ethnopluralism—a “blossoming variety” of local, ethnic, agrarian polities.
Islamistiske grupper havde måneder til at forberede sig på udenlandsk intervention, så i dag er t... more Islamistiske grupper havde måneder til at forberede sig på udenlandsk intervention, så i dag er truslen fra dem mere dynamisk, kompleks og uforudsigelig
The article examines Islamic State's expansion into North Africa and Sahel and the subsequent riv... more The article examines Islamic State's expansion into North Africa and Sahel and the subsequent rivalry between Islamic State and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb − the regional Al Qaeda group. Although IS managed to establish a province in Libya from 2014 through 2016, its presence in North Africa and Sahel (Libya, Sinai, Nigeria) is fragile. AQIM in contrast has a longstanding presence in the region, which appears to be much more consolidated. The rivalry between IS and AQ in this region has incited AQ splinter-groups to unite around AQIM, and in 2016 these groups stepped up their attacks on Western targets.
This article reviews the Aarhus approach to the study of Islamism as presented in a series of art... more 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 ...
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Sep 1, 2014
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11 2001 had a grave impact on t... more 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
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Sep 1, 2014
One of the ways in which the relationship between religion and violence has been conceptualized i... more 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
This paper is under review for publication in Terrorism and Political Violence DIIS Working Paper... more This paper is under review for publication in Terrorism and Political Violence DIIS Working Papers make available DIIS researchers' and DIIS project partners' work in progress towards proper publishing. They may include important documentation which is not necessarily published elsewhere. DIIS Working Papers are published under the responsibility of the author alone. DIIS Working Papers should not be quoted without the express permission of the author.
Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, Oct 10, 2006
Abstract This article examines the widespread assumption that Iran today is a theocracy that has ... more Abstract This article examines the widespread assumption that Iran today is a theocracy that has realized a fusion of religion and politics. It argues that the Iranian state today is neither a theocracy nor an Islamic state but a state that to a large extent is ruled according to a ...
European societies are becoming still more “postsecular” and we therefore need to gain a much mor... more 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 ...
For more than a decade, 'radicalization' has been a keyword in public discourse about terrorism. ... more For more than a decade, 'radicalization' has been a keyword in public discourse about terrorism. The attacks in Paris in 2015, in Brussels in 2016, and the large number of people currently travelling from Europe to Syria are some of the latest events that have kept radicalization at the top of the agenda. In July 2015, British Prime Minister David Cameron, for instance, made a speech on extremism in which he emphasized that: 'No one becomes a terrorist from a standing start. It starts with a process of radicalization.' 1 But what is radicalization? What are we talking about when we evoke the topic of radicalization? And how can we understand processes that-eventually-could lead to terrorism? Despite a widespread use of the term, there is no scholarly consensus on how to understand radicalization. This fuzziness, which allows everybody to conceive of radicalization as they like, is not only an intellectual problem of concern for scholars, but also a challenge for practitioners-police, civil servants, intelligence agents, social workers, prison guards, teachers, community workers-who are summoned to manage the phenomenon and communicate their worries about 'weak signals' and 'early signs of radicalization'. What exactly are these people asked to be on the lookout for? Despite the fact that there is no scholarly consensus on how to define radicalization, a set of preconceived ideas about the phenomenon is nonetheless taken for granted in public discourse. It is, for instance, a widely shared idea that Islamist ideology is a key factor in processes of radicalization and, consequently, that prevention should be targeted at extremist ideas, along with radical imams and mosques. But a primary focus on this specific means of understanding radicalization tends to obscure other aspects. One aim of this article is to question the evidence that surrounds the term 'radicalization' and instead turn it into a problem for analysis. The article therefore asks what the currently dominant concepts of radicalization leave out of sight and argues that radicalization is not an individual * Thanks to the journal's anonymous referees for valuable comments on this article. I also wish to thank Suleiman Mourad for inviting me to the Institut d'Études Avancées de Nantes, which offered me the opportunity to write it. Finally I want to thank my colleagues Mona Sheikh, Tobias Gemmerli and Ann-Sophie Hemmingsen for discussing an earlier version of the article.
Far-right parties and pundits are often portrayed as parochial nationalists obsessed with the ide... more Far-right parties and pundits are often portrayed as parochial nationalists obsessed with the idea of national sovereignty. Opposed to a liberal world order, they prefer a rogue world of nation-states on the loose. This essay seeks to complicate that narrative. It suggests that alongside political parties with a nationalist agenda, an increasing number of voices on the radical Right are now pushing for a re-spiritualized world order in which cultures, civilizations, and empires are to set the scene. This vision of global order echoes Christopher Coker’s recent claim that “we now live in a world in which civilization is fast becoming the currency of international politics.” But, why does this strand of the far-right prefer civilizations to nation-states? To ponder this question, this essay zooms in on the European New Right and more precisely two of its main luminaries, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. It shows how the New Right stretches back to classical geopolitics to imagine a future polycentric world order in which large civilizations are set free from American hegemony. The empires of the future are no longer underpinned by nation-states but by ethnopluralism—a “blossoming variety” of local, ethnic, agrarian polities.
Islamistiske grupper havde måneder til at forberede sig på udenlandsk intervention, så i dag er t... more Islamistiske grupper havde måneder til at forberede sig på udenlandsk intervention, så i dag er truslen fra dem mere dynamisk, kompleks og uforudsigelig
The article examines Islamic State's expansion into North Africa and Sahel and the subsequent riv... more The article examines Islamic State's expansion into North Africa and Sahel and the subsequent rivalry between Islamic State and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb − the regional Al Qaeda group. Although IS managed to establish a province in Libya from 2014 through 2016, its presence in North Africa and Sahel (Libya, Sinai, Nigeria) is fragile. AQIM in contrast has a longstanding presence in the region, which appears to be much more consolidated. The rivalry between IS and AQ in this region has incited AQ splinter-groups to unite around AQIM, and in 2016 these groups stepped up their attacks on Western targets.
This article reviews the Aarhus approach to the study of Islamism as presented in a series of art... more 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 ...
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Sep 1, 2014
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11 2001 had a grave impact on t... more 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
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