Talking to the Enemy

This is representative of a larger trend among jihadis across the world to rely on family and marriage for operations—an important development because as organizations such as JI become increasingly endogamous over time (as friends begin to marry one another’s siblings), they become increasingly bound by a trust that is harder for counterterrorism efforts to penetrate or break.

The religious utopia that jihadis seek strongly resembles the secular utopias in nineteenth-and twentieth-century European thought, such as fascism’s organic ethnic community or communism’s classless international society.

is mostly youth in transition who persuade other youth in transition that heaven is built on the foundations of hell.

Compared to an earlier Saudi sample,12 the newer wave tends to be somewhat younger (and more likely to be single), less educated and less financially well off, less ideological, and more prone to prior involvement in criminal activities unrelated to jihad, such as drugs, theft, and aggravated assault. They are much more likely to read jihadi literature in their daily lives than other forms of literature. They tend to look up to role models who stress violence in jihad,

Without institutions to override primary confessional loyalties, liberal democracy has not proven strong at dealing with rival claims of long-standing ethnic communities living on traditional territory in multicultural settings.

without “barbarians” to jolt them, civilized societies tended to collapse rather than continue to create.

People who are humiliated generally don’t take the path of violence (as studies I present later show). But those who do may seek to avenge the humiliation of others for whom they care.

The idea that joining jihad is a carefully calculated decision or that people are “brainwashed” or “recruited” into “cells” or “councils” by “organizations” with “infrastructures” that can be hit and destroyed is generally wrong.

small-group dynamics—intimate interacting networks of family, friends, schoolmates, workmates, soccer buddies, and such—were key to the making of terrorists.

most of humanity is politically engaged. Many, especially the young, are increasingly independent yet interactive, in the search for respect and meaning in life, in their visions of economic advancement and environmental awareness.