European Eye on Radicalization
Accurate, exhaustive, and fluid: Institutionalizing Violence. Strategies of Jihad in Egypt represents an invaluable resource for readers of diverse backgrounds who want to deepen their knowledge of jihadism and political violence in Egypt and beyond. Relying on a flawless historical reconstruction, the book also benefits from the author Jerome Drevon’s extensive field research.
Drevon, a Senior Analyst on Jihad in Modern Conflict for the International Crisis Group, interviewed a number of al-Gama’a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group, IG) and al-Jihad al-Islamy (Jihad Group, JG) members and former members who, in turn, granted him access to the groups’ leadership. After 2011, he organized collective and individual meetings and joined them in their local communities, political party meetings, sit-ins, and street demonstrations. The ethnographic approach and breadth of interviews were important for analyzing these groups’ realities from within and to understand individual experiences in the two groups, as well as their changing positions on violence and non-violence.
In 2011, a popular uprising, which began in Tunisia and then spread to other Arab countries, caused political upheaval in only a few days. In Egypt, the uprising toppled then-president Hosni Mubarak. This was a feat that neither IG nor JG were able to accomplish in three decades despite their best efforts. As a result, these Islamist groups had to adapt to a new reality, rebuild their organizations, and reconcile new political opportunities with their ideological commitments.
Successive Radicalization
In order to connect the past and the present of these two organizations, Drevon structures the book thematically. After the Introduction, Chapter 2 presents the analytical framework of the book in the controversial politics research agenda. The work situates jihadist groups in a multi-level environment constituted by their political environment, social movement, security services, the public, and a potential countermovement. Interestingly, the chapter argues that jihadist groups can successively radicalize in their interactions with any of these actors. The author asserts that the succession of several phases of radicalization and institutionalization shapes groups’ long-term trajectories and strategic choices.
Chapter 3 analyzes the comparative emergence of IG and JG in the 1970s. In the words of the author, the two groups centered their main ideological precepts of jihadi-salafism on their opposition to secularized and Westernized Muslim leaders who did not apply Islamic Law comprehensively. Despite this similarity, their comparative radicalization reflected different mechanisms of radicalization that shaped these groups’ early institutionalization. JG radicalized in interactions with the state and the political environment but failed to institutionalize internally because of the high-risk nature of the group’s attempt to topple the regime. Therefore, the group remained an agglomeration of loosely connected cells before 1981. Conversely, IG was a proselytization movement that institutionalized before embracing violence in response to political developments and a subsequent crackdown by security forces. These contrasting trajectories contextualize IG’s relatively advanced internal institutionalization before the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981.
Strategic Institutionalization
Chapter 4 delves into jihadist groups’ strategic institutionalization. This chapter contends that the construction and implementation of armed groups’ strategic views is the product of external and internal developments. The two groups’ institutional trajectories mediated the impact of these groups’ exile to Afghanistan and Pakistan during the war against the Soviet Union and ultimate strategic failure to achieve their objectives in Egypt. This explains IG’s renunciation of the applicability of violence in Muslim countries when the JG partially joined al-Qaeda.
Chapter 5 examines these groups’ resort to armed violence in Egypt and abroad. This chapter argues that jihadist groups’ internal institutionalization accounts for the practicalities of violence beyond stated ideological commitments and changing policing of protest. Strongly institutionalized groups like IG are better positioned to use violence in line with their tactical and strategic preferences and prevent counterproductive violence, in contrast to weakly institutionalized groups like JG. In both cases, institutional decay ultimately produced increasingly indiscriminate violence disconnected from the achievement of any long-term strategic objectives.
Chapter 6 analyzes the emergence of non-violent political alternatives. This chapter argues that it is contingent on jihadist groups’ interactions with the Islamist social movement and on the credibility of non-violent political alternatives. However, jihadist groups do not necessarily join the political process when authoritarian regimes democratize. A consensual decision to create a political party is contingent on jihadist groups’ ability to take consensual decisions at the leadership level while maintaining the loyalty of their members which, in the case of IG and JG, is rooted in their institutionalized collective group identities.
The conclusion of the book discusses this case study and its generalizability. After discussing the evolution of IG and JG, the author examines the strategic development of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in light of the institutional trajectories of IG and JG. Finally, he examines the contribution of this book to existing debates on political violence and democracy, and on the role of ideas. before presenting new avenues for future research.
Practical Positioning
Among the multiple insights provided by the author in Institutionalizing Violence, two conclusions can be drawn from the research. The first is that armed groups’ ideological commitments are both enduring and flexible, and the two do not negate each other. This is something that radicalization and terrorism studies still fail to sufficiently highlight. Militants who spend decades engaged in jihad to establish an Islamic state do not easily renounce their raison d’être. At best, they adapt their political preferences to justify new, practical positions that might be at odds with their ideological tenets.
In this respect, Drevon quotes Middle East politics professor Ioana Emy Matesan, defining them as “principled pragmatists”. The most illustrative example of this is the authoring by IG, and parts of JG, of the most comprehensive ideological revisions of the applicability of violence in the Muslim world in the aftermath of 9/11. The revisions did not renounce jihad nor their quest for an Islamic state. The two groups instead argued that violence yields more negative than positive benefits and is, therefore, impracticable in the Muslim world.
Similar ideological adjustments occurred after 2011. IG’s most senior religious authority (mufti) continued to denounce democracy, but also argued that the new political system had become Islamic since it recognized the pre-eminence of Islamic Law (shari‘a). Another JG commander argued that he still believed in jihad and that the new political environment implied that political parties had become the most appropriate tool of jihad. Generic ideological positions on democracy, jihad, and the creation of Islamic states cannot explain these groups’ practical political preferences as they exist within their socio-political contexts.
Different Approaches
The second important insight is that two groups that share similar ideological commitments can react very differently to the same political opening. In Egypt, IG defended a peaceful consensual political transition after 2011. Its leaders opposed the escalation of violent street protests against military authorities. When protestors attacked the US embassies in Libya and Tunisia, IG actively dissuaded local Egyptians from similarly storming the US embassy next to the group’s Cairo-based sit-in. Instead, IG joined the political process with former political contenders and attempted to become a mainstream political party that obtained 13 seats in the parliament despite long-standing theological opposition to democracy and party politics.
Conversely, JG leaders did not present a unified response to the democratization of Egypt’s political system. Although some of them created a marginal political party, many prominent JG figures established the jihadi-salafist trend that opposed the legitimacy of party politics after 2011. Several ultimately settled in Syria, where they integrated with the leadership of the then al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.
JG’s evolution is very much driven by its organizational dynamics. Regardless of the similarity of their ideological commitments, jihadist groups organize very differently. The author explains that field research with IG, for instance, revealed a notable culture of consensus and mutual respect among its leaders, as well as a real reverence from their former foot soldiers to their leaders. Despite internal differences of opinion, Drevon noted that IG leaders never blamed or denounced one another in his presence. This was in sharp contrast to JG, whose leaders and commanders readily attacked one another in interviews for psychological deficiencies, vicious tendencies, and collaboration with security forces. Some of them even made these debates public, claiming that other factions never belonged to the group. These divergences are critical and shaped IG and JG’s strategic choices for the past four decades — from their use of violence and association with al-Qaeda in the 1990s to their partial rejection of violence in the 2000s.
Internal Dynamics
These insights were possible thanks to the approach adopted in the book. In fact, much research on prominent jihadist leaders has overlooked key internal dynamics that drive armed groups’ long-term evolution. What matters is not that jihadist groups are jihadist, but that they are groups. A key feature of research on violence in Egypt is its focus on prominent individuals. Several ideologues and entrepreneurs of violence take center stage to identify their main ideological concepts or role in jihadist mobilization. One assumption of this research is that the ideological contributions or biographies of notable figures provide a rich understanding of the domestic and international socio-political environments in which violence spreads.
However, while the focus on prominent jihadists can be useful, it can also backfire. Individual biographies illustrate the influence of prominent figures in the evolution of jihadist groups. Instead of essentializing their beliefs, it exposes the impact of individual choices, internal disagreements, and conflicts of personalities. This raises important questions. Would jihadist groups, including AQ, have taken a substantially different direction without Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden, and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Is it possible that they would not even have emerged without them? Excessive attention on prominent individuals can exacerbate their agency and overlook the structural contexts that made them. Moreover, if jihadist groups’ comparative trajectories are simply the outcome of the peculiar choices of their leaders, how can they be compared to other cases, including non-Islamists?
Conclusion
Drevon’s work moves beyond the exclusive focus on jihadist ideologues and leaders and analyzes the centrality of jihadist groups’ organizational dynamics beyond the classical debate between networked and hierarchical modes of organization. There is still little research on how jihadist groups organize, consolidate shared ideas, and socialize their members, as well as how this impacts their long-term strategic choices. Drevon’s comparison of the two groups evolving in the same environment succeeds in explaining their diverging reactions to the same changing political opportunities, up to their partial joining of the political process after 2011.
Institutionalizing Violence. Strategies of Jihad in Egypt is one of the very few works capable of constructing a theoretical framework that thoroughly analyzes the peculiarities of two specific jihadist groups and, at the same time, can be relevant outside Egypt for the study of other instances of political violence and jihadist movements’ dynamics.
