Search results

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.In From Jihad to Politics, Jerome Drevon offers a comprehensive examination of the Syrian armed opposition, tracing the emergence of Jihadi groups in the conflict, their increasing dominance, and their political transformation. Drawing upon extensive field research and interviews with Syrian insurgents in northwestern Syria and Turkey, Drevon demonstrates how the context of a local conflict can shape combatants groups' behavior in unexpected ways. Further, he marshals unique evidence from the Arab world's most intense conflict of this century to explain why the trajectory of the broader transnational Jihadi movement has altered course in recent years.

In 'From Jihad to Politics', Jerome Drevon offers a comprehensive examination of the Syrian armed opposition, tracing the emergence of Jihadi groups in the conflict, their increasing dominance, and their political transformation. Drawing upon extensive field research and interviews with Syrian insurgents in northwestern Syria and Turkey, Drevon demonstrates how the context of a local conflict can shape combatants groups' behavior in unexpected ways. Further, he marshals unique evidence from the Arab world's most intense conflict of this century to explain why the trajectory of the broader transnational Jihadi movement has altered course in recent years.

Institutionalizing Violence offers a detailed focus on the two most influential Egyptian jihadi groups-al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad. From the killing of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 to their partial association with al-Qaeda in the 1990s, the two groups illustrate the range of choices that jihadis make overtime including creating political parties. Jerome Drevon argues that these groups' comparative trajectories show that jihadis embracing the same ideology can make very different strategic decisions in similar environments. Drevon's analysis of these groups' histories over the past four decades illustrates the evolution of jihadism in Egypt and beyond. Institutionalizing Violence develops an institutional approach to radicalization to compare the two Egyptian groups' trajectories based on ethnographic field research and hundreds of interviews with jihadi leaders and militants in Egypt. Drevon provides a unique perspective on how jihadi groups make and implement new strategic decisions in changing environments, as well as the evolution of their approaches to violence and non-violence.

The territories ruled by the Syrian opposition are being reorganised. The leaderless revolution has given way to a seizure of power by vanguardist and ideological organisations, be it the PYD in the northeast or HTS, the former local branch of AQ, in Idlib. However, these organisations cannot resist the regime's military threat to reconquer the territories or the Turkish intervention by themselves. They need to manage the internationalisation of the conflict to protect themselves and find space in the broader strategic game around Syria. This is the strategy of HTS. After emerging from the matrix of AQ's global jihad, since 2017 HTS has sought to 'institutionalise' the revolution by imposing its military hegemony and full control of the institutions of local governance. The group has thus marginalised the revolutionary milieu, other Islamists and the threat posed by AQ supporters and IS cells in Idlib. HTS's domination was followed by a policy of gradual opening and mainstreamisation. The group has had to open up to local communities and make concessions, especially in the religious sphere. HTS is seeking international acceptance with the development of a strategic partnership with Turkey and desires to open dialogue with Western countries. Overall, HTS has transformed from formerly being a salafi jihadi organisation into having a new mainstream approach to political Islam.