What is it about?

Is it possible to find common underlying motivations driving young men and women to volunteer for jihad? Do young Muslims face different constraints that explain their involvement in militant activity, particularly being more vulnerable to factors such as socioeconomic marginalisation? Does socialisation in peer-to-peer ideological networks, and small-group recruitment within pre-existing radical milieus play a decisive role? By identifying biographical factors that stand out in two radicalisation theories – social network analysis, and the relative deprivation hypothesis -, it is possible to elicit what factors hold when applied specifically to the Portuguese case. The data provide support to socioeconomic explanations and group-level factors as the main mechanisms that lead converts to involvement in extremism and terrorism.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The article provides a new contribution to radicalisation by using a new dataset and an understudied case study: Portugal. It hosts a small Muslim community, which has not found itself under the spotlight of being a major concern in terms of terrorist threat. This article builds the profile and trajectories of Portuguese jihadists, thereby offering a new contribution to knowledge on the topic of European foreign fighters. The existing literature on Portugal’s jihadists is quite limited, both at national and international level.

Perspectives

This article builds the socioeconomic profile and radicalisation trajectories of Portuguese jihadists, thereby offering a new contribution to knowledge on the topic of European foreign fighters.

Dr. Maria do Céu Pinto Arena
Universidade do Minho

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The Portuguese foreign fighters phenomenon: a preliminary assessment, Journal of Policing Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, January 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/18335330.2018.1432881.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page