Explaining Transnational Jihad - Patterns of Escalation and Containment | TRANSJIHAD | Progetto | Scheda informativa | H2020 | CORDIS

Descrizione del progetto

Lo sfruttamento dei conflitti locali operato dai movimenti jihadisti transnazionali

Alcuni movimenti jihadisti che operano a livello internazionale tra l’Asia, il Medio Oriente, la penisola araba e l’Africa, quali ad esempio Stato islamico e Al-Qaeda, hanno dimostrato la loro capacità di approfittare delle guerre e dei conflitti locali, mentre spesso accade che movimenti jihadisti locali come i talebani e Boko Haram si alleino con la realtà transnazionale. Il progetto TRANSJIHAD, finanziato dall’UE, approfondirà il processo e le circostanze secondo cui i conflitti jihadisti diventano transnazionali e le possibili strategie di contenimento degli stessi. Il progetto studierà il jihadismo internazionale, tenendo conto degli aspetti religiosi e politici dei processi di transnazionalizzazione. Confronterà inoltre l’ascesa e il declino del coinvolgimento jihadista nei conflitti locali e multinazionali. I risultati consolideranno la nostra comprensione dei processi di transnazionalizzazione del jihadismo e fornirà suggerimenti utili alla risoluzione dei conflitti internazionali.

Obiettivo

TRANSJIHAD aims at advancing our understanding of one of the greatest contemporary challenges on the international agenda for peace and security, namely the ability of transnational jihadist movements to tap into local conflicts, hence escalating violence. TRANSJIHAD specifically investigates the questions of how jihadist conflicts become transnational and under what circumstances they can be contained. The project also aims at developing an interdisciplinary analytical framework, which combines micro- and macro level approaches to jihadism, drawing from both Religious Studies, Security Studies and Peace & Conflict Studies.
Methodologically, TRANSJIHAD dissolves the scientific dichotomy between inside- and outside-oriented approaches to the study of transnational jihadist conflicts, widening prevailing scientific understandings of transnationalization processes. The project uniquely combines i) a quantitative examination of transnationalization processes drawing from the Religion and Armed Conflicts (RELAC) dataset based at Uppsala University, ii) comparative case studies of the mechanisms of escalation and de-escalation of jihadist conflicts across Asia, the Middle East, the Arab Peninsula and Africa focusing on the movements of Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, the Taleban, and Boko Haram, iii) securitization analyses of the macro-level conflict structures that transnational jihadist movements tap into, and finally iv) sociotheological worldview analyses of potential changes in jihadist conflict imagery during transnationalization processes.
With its focus on macro-level conflict structures, TRANSJIHAD also contributes to developing a new framework for thinking about containment, providing an alternative to both the micro-level countering discourses embraced by much of the radicalization research, and the containment thinking that stems from the treatment of jihadist conflicts as civil wars in the peace and conflict literature.