Paper presenters
- Johannes Due Enstad: Doing the Right Thing: The Moral Imperative of Right-Wing Violence
- Hajra Tahir: The Impact of Various Forms of Threat on Violent Attitude and Behavior among Muslims in Norway and UK
- Ragnhild Sørbotten Moen and Jeanett Pettersen: Radicalization and religious emotions
- Sara Jul Jacobsen: Gender and Jihad
Abstracts
Doing the Right Thing: The Moral Imperative of Right-Wing Violence
Johannes Due Enstad, University of Oslo
This paper draws attention to the central role of emotionally experienced moral motivation in explaining right-wing violence (as well as other forms of political violence). While recognized as an essential element of almost any form of violence, and of human social interaction in general, most explanations of right-wing violence dismiss moral motivation altogether, overlook it, or accord it a peripheral role. To dismiss or overlook moral motivation leaves us at risk of misunderstanding what activists and perpetrators are up to and why. Rather than moralizing over what we deem to be immoral beliefs or behavior, we should try to understand the moralization going on within the minds of activists and perpetrators. As a step in this direction, the paper develops a moral-motivational analytical framework for studying right-wing and other political violence consisting of three core elements: moral emotions, social relationship regulation, and cultural variation.
Radicalisation and religious emotions
Ragnhild Sørbotten Moen and Jeanett Pettersen, University of Agder
In the years 2012 to 2016, thousands of young boys and girls travelled from western countries to Syria as foreign fighters to join ISIS. Left behind was communities in disbelief and in need for a deeper understanding of radicalisation processes.
As part of my Ph.D-project within the field of Sociology of Religion, I have conducted interviews with individuals who are former members of Islamist groups and organisations that support violent jihad. The informants have expressed how they understand their own radicalisation and pointed at the religious, social and emotional factors that drove their processes towards violence.
In this paper I will tell some of their stories. From working with the material in this research, the topic of emotions emerged. Subsequently, this paper poses the question: “What role does emotions play in a radicalisation process, and are emotions meaningful to study in the search to understand the role of religion in a radicalisation process?”
I will argue why there is reason to examine the emotional driving forces in the continuous search to understand religious radicalisation, particularly the emotion of shame and the religious emotions that arises upon encountering manipulative and forceful propaganda.
The Impact of Various Forms of Threat on Violent Attitude and Behavior among Muslims in Norway and UK
Hajra Tahir and David L. Sam, University of Bergen, Jonas Kunst, University of Oslo and University of Yale
The current century has been characterized by the frequency of terrorism that continues to threaten world security. Thus, the need to understand not only what motivates people to think violence, but how these thoughts develop into violent actions, cannot be understated.
Using structural equation modeling, this cross-sectional study examined direct and indirect effects of different forms of perceived realistic, safety and symbolic threats on violent attitude and behavior of 253 Norwegian Muslims and 204 British Muslims.
Furthermore, the study examined the mediator role of religious and host country acculturation orientations. Our results show that in the presence of perceived threat, only direct effects were found for violent attitude and behavior in Norway, while in UK, support for both direct and indirect results was found. However, across the samples, the results indicated that various forms of perceived threats affected Muslims’ violent attitude and behavior in distinct ways.
These effects were both positive and negative, differed between the two samples, and in UK, were mediated by the participants’ religious acculturation orientations. The findings from both samples suggest that perceived threat exhibit violent attitude and violent behavior.
Gender and Jihad
Sara Jul Jacobsen, Roskilde University
Within the last ten years, studies on terrorism have increasingly focused on women. However, the body of literature on women within jihad-Salafism is still small. And although social media – particularly in recent years – has played an essential part in jihadi-Salafists’ female-specific recruitment strategy (Klausen 2015; Pearson & Winterbotham 2017), research on the issue is almost non-existent.
This article therefore examines how jihadi-Salafi organisations on social media motivate women to take part in defensive jihad (jihad al-daf’a), i.e. violent defense of Islam (Lahoud 2014). The article is based on an open-source study of text and audio-uploads posted by Danish jihadi-Salafi organisations. The article finds that the Danish jihadi-Salafists motivate women to take part in jihad by referencing female-specific classic doctrines of jihad from the ‘Qurʾān and ahadith i.e. early records of tradition (Waines 2003). Moreover they refer to the lives of female fighters from the time of the Prophet.
However the Danish jihadi-Salafists’ female-specific motivation narratives are not simply conservative and pre-modern but also contemporary. Thus the Danish jihadi-Salafists also motivate Muslim women to take part in jihad by addressing modern-day policy issues. In doing so, they continuously counter-position a (perceived) western essentialist view on Muslim women as passive victims of oppressive male ideologies as well as Western feminist perceptions. Thus the Danish jihadi-Salafists motivate women to take part in jihad by deconstructing ‘the Muslim woman’ in gender-specific narratives in which jihadi-Salafism is an important source of not merely authensity but also a strong self-identity and (em)power(ment).