‘Reaching the land of jihad’ - Dutch Syria volunteers, hijra and counter-conduct

Abstract

The topic of hijra is very much present in the ideological messages of IslamicState and Al Qaeda as well as in many studies exploring why and how people are motivated to join the violent struggles in Syria. Yet, with a few exceptions, many studies mention hijra as something self-evident without exploring the meanings attached to hijra among the volunteers who joined Al Qaeda and/or IS. Based upon ethnographic work among Dutch Islamic militant activists of the Behind Bars network constituting a very vocal early contingent of male Syria volunteers, this article explores the meanings of hijra. I will show that ideas about hijra were essential to the construction of their departure narratives and examine how hijra for them, in different and sometimes contradicting ways, became a pathway to an ethical and political transformation. One which was, at the same time, being instrumentalized to strengthen the very type of governance they tried to escape.

(Counter)Terrorism and the Intimate

“…Several studies stand as an important exception, such as the work by Jaafar Alloul (2019) on the digital media performances of the "foreign terrorist fi ghters, " as well as the work of Gabe Mythen, Sandra Walklate, and Fatima Khan ( 2009) that uses focus groups with the Muslim community in the UK. Th e latter study sheds some light on the complex practices of security and enactments of identity and subjectivity in public space by a community that has been a target of suspicion as part of the UK counterterrorism strategy (see also Hussain and Bagguley 2012;De Koning 2021 in the case of Netherlands; Kublitz 2021 in the case of Denmark; Hergon, this issue, in the case of France).…”

“…In recent years, there has been a noticeable growth of ethnographic research of the everyday impacts of terrorism, counterterror security, and radicalization discourses (De Koning 2021;Fadil et al 2019;Kublitz 2021;Nguyen 2019) and the everyday memorialization practices following terrorist attacks (Gensburger 2017), however the site of the intimate as more than discursive is somewhat under-theorized, and it is rarely central to these important ethnographic studies. Th e site of the intimate is a compelling yet rather absent analytic for understanding the proliferating spatialities of terrorism and the interconnections between the global and the everyday accounts of terrorism.…”

Virtual innocence. On the status of the children of European departees in northeast Syria

“…Anticipating the return of European departees 3 became particularly salient after the involvement of some in the attack of 2014 at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, or the 2015 attacks in Paris (on January 7 th and November 13 th ). Research has however nuanced the potential threat of the returnees and sought to examine under what conditions they could be reintegrated into the European continent (Lindekilde, Bertelsen and Stohl 2016, Ragazzi and Walmsley 2018, Renard and Coolsaet 2018 Besides this first line of inquiry, a growing number of studies has, however, also attended to how the "foreign fighter question" has transformed and reshaped several institutional and legal arrangements around citizenship and security in the European continent (Bakker, Paulussen and Entenmann 2014, Bures 2020, de Guttry, Capone and Paulussen 2016, Ragazzi and Walmsley 2018, Scherrer 2018. Analysts have thereby noted growing convergences across the different European Member States in tackling this question, despite the initial differences in treating this question (Bures 2020, Paulussen and Entenmann 2016, Van Poecke and Wauters 2021.…”