The presence or absence of violence has been a long guiding benchmark to determine degrees of Islamist extremism. But with global national strategies increasingly focussed on a long-term ‘battle of ideas’ in the prevention of extremism and terrorism, how far is the research community ready to support them?

Emman will discuss how fixations on violence has reduced the discourse on Islamist extremism into two divergent camps: those who view non-violent Islamists as enablers of terrorism, and those who view them as firewalls. She will show how for both violent and non-violent Islamist groups, objective evidence is lacking and our frameworks of analysis too rigid to explore the important ideological gymnastics that have come to shape a multigenerational movement.

Decades of research into terrorism has improved our understanding of the ideology behind violent extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. But the body of literature is yet to objectively trace the links between Islamist groups who today prefer to operate via political reconciliation, and jihadist groups who increasingly incorporate soft hearts and minds strategies in the territories they capture. Is it right to see armed and unarmed groups in equal measure? Are our demarcations of ‘non-violent’ and ‘violent’ groups helpful or harmful? Do we need a new model for studying the global Islamist movement that places more emphasis on objectives, and less on tactics? Can the history of the movement tell us more about its future than the present?

Emman’s three-year research at KCL will be focussed on identifying and tracing the historical and contemporary arguments made by the intellectual leaders and propagandists of the global Islamist movement. Her analysis of transitions of thought through time will draw on the seminal texts, revisions, and populist propaganda of today’s non-violent and violent Islamist groups, with an emphasis on mapping the crossovers of different and sometimes competing ideologies across what she sees as an artificial and arbitrary demarcation of ‘violent and non-violent’ groups.

Bios

Dr Emman El-Badawy is the head of research in the Co-Existence team at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. She oversees the design and delivery of research projects and shapes the Institute’s research agenda on extremism. Emman is also a fellow of the British Academy and of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Her current three-year research, funded by the British Academy and in collaboration with King’s College London’s Professor John Bew, is a comparative study of violent and nonviolent Islamist propaganda. She holds a PhD in Arab and Islamic studies from the University of Exeter.

Dr. Shiraz Maher is Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) and a member of the War Studies Department at King’s College London. He currently leads the Centre’s research on the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and also researches Salafi-Jihadi soteriology.

Dr Martyn Frampton is a Reader in Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of 3 books on ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and more recently has completed a lengthy book on the history of the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the West, published by Harvard University Press in 2018.