ABSTRACT
Answering the question why and how someone would decide for the Islamist radical occupation rather than something else, or, in a more detailed manner, how someone would come to see success or status in the form of being a Mujahid and acting accordingly implies following individual developments along a process, the process of Islamist radical occupational choice. It implies identifying phases of involvement and preoccupation with this particular occupation, capturing lower-level mechanisms or ‘sub-processes’, the interaction between ideas and behaviour and between individuals and their social environment. This is based on the assumption that the radicalisation process does not occur in a vacuum, but within and in interaction with patterns of ideas and behaviour existent around it, including other social processes; and implies several principles:
that these ideas and corresponding behaviour change over time;
that the radicalisation process is not sui generis, but is a variation of a process usually existent in society, in this case choosing an occupation; and
that, consequently, motivational variables, i.e. the criteria by which an occupation is chosen, are also variations (in the sense of differently defined in relation to different sets of values) of regular ones existing in society.
