Radicalisation in the Diaspora: Why Muslims in the West Attack Their Host Countries

In recent years the focus of terrorism research has shifted onto the terrorists themselves, and onto militant Islamists in the West in particular. We owe to these studies much knowledge and insight into the process in which average young males can be transformed into individuals willing to kill innocent people. Nevertheless, from a more analytical point of view, there is a lack of a theoretical framework linking these different pieces of knowledge to each other –not an overarching general theory but what Merton would have called a middle-range theory[1] to shed light on the strange phenomenon of ‘homegrown’ terrorism in the West–. The thesis of this working paper is that the concepts of exile and/or diaspora radicalism can be helpful in this context.

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