There has been heated discussion for years about jihadists born or raised in the West – in France, especially since the 2015 Paris attacks. Every new attack in Europe or the US re-opens the arguments about the origins of this evil, and the most effective way to contain it. The idea that the fault lies with Islam as a religion and culture has poisoned public debate, even though only a minority believes it, especially in the political sphere. While social networks amplify such essentialist ideas, experts in Islam, political science and conflict studies offer more nuanced explanations, though without necessarily reaching any consensus.

Sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar locates the roots of French jihadism not in Islam but in the ‘very deep crisis in western societies.’ He believes the appeal of ISIS (Islamic State) derives from ‘a crisis of utopia: the absence of a political outlet in increasingly unequal societies.’ We no longer have groups like Italy’s Red Brigades or Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, which once recruited support for armed struggle. Today, he says, social injustice leads to a ‘double form of radicalisation, both populist and jihadist.’

Laurent Bonelli, a political scientist from the University of Paris X (Nanterre), also highlights how jihadist ideology provides the only political grand narrative that resonates with people who have internalised a sense of subjugation. Bonelli, who is taking part in a field study of French jihadists in jail, says: ‘Jihadist discourse avoids the social question. It emphasises the existence of a system of oppression, but brings it back to the duality of Muslim versus non-Muslim.’

Myriam Benraad of the University of Limerick in Ireland sees jihadism as a political reaction to imbalances in the Arab-Muslim world, and its inhabitants’ resentment of the West, which they hold largely responsible for their situation: ‘Jihadism needs to be treated as a contemporary ideology to be comprehensible. You have to pay (...)