Escaping Freedom. The Path of Young Men into Jihadism

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ferdinand Sutterlüty
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403605297

From 2011 to 2016, more than 800 people headed from Germany to civil war areas in Syria and Iraq, in order to join jihadist groups and help building up a so-called Islamic State. The project deals with this phenomenon and develops an empirically grounded theory that explains the actions of this movement’s actors. Within the framework of a qualitative research design, it aims to analyze the careers of young German and Austrian men who joined jihadism as foreign fighters. Three dimensions of operationalization characterize the project: a) Interviews with former jihadist foreign fighters will put the research on a new empirical basis that provides deeper insights into the biographical processes of radicalization. b) Jihadism will be conceptualized as a subculture; this helps broaden the interactionist concept of a career and open the research for the consideration of various social factors and normative structures that determine biographical processes. Radicalization can thereby be analyzed as a social problem. c) The mediation of biographical processes with their social and cultural conditions facilitates an analysis of the specific roles played by both the actors’ affinity for violence and the influence of male gender identities within the radicalization process. This research design is informed by latest concepts of both the sociology of violence and gender. As to methodological conceptualization, the research project refers to Anselm Strauss’s tradition of grounded theory and the documentary method. Both approaches help develop sociological theory from empirical data and provide analytical instruments for an inquiry into the social and cultural conditions of radicalization. The research results will not only provide new insights into jihadist careers but will also contribute to current theoretical debates on violence, gender and subculture. Furthermore, they can be adopted in contexts of prevention and deradicalization work.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants