ABSTRACT
Globalization has introduced significant advancements in commerce, communications, information exchanges and freedom of mobility. Ray Kiley considers globalization as ‘a world in which societies, cultures, politics and economies have, in some sense, come closer together’ (Kiley, 1998: 3). In globalization’s more banal and mundane manifestations, dominant global particular forms (Featherstone, 1995: 6) of popular culture, sport, etc. are adapted, accommodated, synthesized or resisted in different localities, based on local needs and their perceived benefit or threat to indigenous conditions, elites, populations or notions of culture and identity (Lentini, 2002, 2003a; Mitchell, 2001). Nevertheless, it has also generated risks and negative consequences, including those which impact upon job security, the environment, the growth of crime and narcotics syndicates, and trafficking in weapons and persons, to name but a few of its more notable damaging results (Beck, 2002). Among the myriad challenges that globalization’s effluent poses to international civil society, global terrorism and militancy, and in particular neojihadism, receives the greatest degree of international media attention. Neojihadism is my own term and has several important characteristics and qualities:
Neojihadism is a diverse, syncretic form of global organization and • interaction that emerged from within Islam, that is unique to the late twentieth and (at present) early twenty-first-centuries, and through its advocacy and execution of violence and selectively literal interpretations of sacred texts, radically differentiates itself from the faith’s mainstream, and constitutes a distinct body of thought and actions. Neojihadism is simultaneously a religious, political, paramilitary and • terrorist global movement, a subculture, a counterculture, and an ideology that seeks to establish states governed by laws according to the dictates of selectively literal interpretations of the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, (normally) through enacting violence.
