How threatening are al-Qaeda and the Islamic State? In Jihadism
Constrained, Barak Mendelsohn suggests that although jihadi
terrorism is a serious challenge, it must not be exaggerated.
Transnational terrorist organizations and jihadi transnational
groups in particular face three central challenges: How to create a
polity that is based on religious affiliation when most people
identify with national and sub-national identities? How to generate
political effects across borders? And how to produce unity among
all components of the transnational movement? The book argues that
transnational jihadism has been struggling on all three fronts.
Success of armed nonstate actors hinges on their ability to
mobilize the masses, but transnational jihadis persuaded only a
tiny fraction of the world's Muslims to abandon their other
identity markers and support a faith-based global polity that
promotes an extreme interpretation of Islam. As military pressure
endangers cross-border activities, jihadi groups introduced local
branches only to find that such localization undermines their
transnational agenda. Jihadi groups also lack a viable plan to turn
armed success in separate states into cross-border political
effects. Finally, jihadis regularly fall into internal conflicts.
These conflicts are exacerbated by the use of Islamic discourse
that renders compromise and reconciliation particularly difficult.
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