Contextualising Jihadi Thought

Deol Jeevan, Kazmi Zaheer

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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.

About the Author

Jeevan Deol has taught and researched on South Asian history, South Asian religion and jihadi ideologies at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and London.

Zaheer Kazmi is part of the Faculty of History, University of Oxford. He was formerly a Senior Research Analyst at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He holds a PhD in international political theory from the University of Cambridge.

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