by Jeffry R. Halverson* “If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honor has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity.”                                                   [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson Put him in power and see how wise he is. – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms I have spent an inordinate amount of time studying Islamist ideologues and their ideas during my relatively short lifetime. I’ve never read War and Peace, but I have read Milestones and The Neglected Duty. [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson I recently traveled to Tunisia where I visited the ancient holy city of Kairouan. Elections for the constituent assembly to produce a new Tunisian constitution are less than two weeks away and there is a lot of discussion taking place about the nature of Tunisian identity and the role of Islam [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson The Karbala master narrative is one of the most rich and influential in the Islamic world, specifically among Shi‘a societies. We devoted an entire chapter to it in the book Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism, and Kamran Scott Aghaie has penned a wonderful study of it in relation to the history [...]

by Bud Goodall The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia last week beget further democracy uprisings in Egypt and Yemen this week, as well as protests in Jordan and Mauritania.  If the protesters are finally successful in Egypt and President Hosni Mubarak is forced out, this eruption of game-changing scenarios inspired by deep conflicts between the people [...]

by Steven R. Corman CSC researchers Pauline Cheong and Jeff Halverson have just published a paper in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism that will be of interest to readers of this blog.  The paper examines al Qaeda texts from 1996-2009 to determine strategies used by the group to construct a pro-radical identity for [...]

by Jeffry Halverson In the September 10 cover story on ForeignPolicy.com Jarret Brachman warns the Obama administration to pay careful attention to al-Qaeda’s new Libyan-born media darling, Abu Yahya al-Libi. He writes: Whether he’s shown traipsing through valleys, target shooting with his buddies, reciting poetry on a mountaintop, or breaking bread with his students, Abu [...]

by Mark Woodward* Over the last year it has become increasingly apparent to progressive Indonesian Muslim intellectuals and political leaders that there is a clear association between the spread of Wahhabi religious teachings and political extremism. In the weeks following the Ritz-Carlton and J. W. Marriott bombings in Jakarta, discourse about the dangers of Wahhabism [...]

By Pauline Hope Cheong Two related white papers have generated fresh buzz about Internet radicalization in recent weeks.  These papers are in substantial disagreement about the basic issue of how much of a force the Internet is in causing radicalization.  This is a sign that the process is not yet well-enough understood, and that we [...]

This case illustrates the power of communication to divide audiences and create a systematic perturbance, opening opportunities to question those who advance the message.