ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the findings that are significant not only for what they tell us about a banned Islamist group that espouses the use of political violence against Western governments, but for highlighting the value of mixed methods in studying such militant networks more generally. It presents preliminary results of Al-Muhajiroun (AM), a former Islamist group in the United Kingdom that was banned by British authorities in 2010. Definitions aside, terrorist and militant networks alike are frequently characterized by opacity, decentralization, fluidity and illegality. Competitive adaptation is thus the framework from which we approach our study of militant groups, and we employ ethnographically based network analysis as our primary tool when modelling this framework. Kenney explains that militant groups might fail to adapt within their environments not only due to simple mistakes and human error, but potentially due to the underlying structures, ideologies or rules guiding an organization's behavior.
