Neoliberalism and neo-jihadism

This ground-breaking book examines the political-economic characteristics of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century ‘neo-jihadism’. Drawing on Bourdieusian and neo-Marxist ideas, it investigates how the neo-jihadist organisations Al Qaeda and Islamic State engage with the capitalist paradigm of neoliberalism in their anti-capitalist propaganda and quasi-capitalist financial practices.

An investigation of documents and discourses reveals interactions between neoliberalism and neo-jihadism characterised by surface-level contradiction, and structural connections that are both dialectical and mutually reinforcing. Neoliberalism here is argued to constitute an underlying ‘status quo’, while neo-jihadism, as an evolving form of political organisation, is perpetuated as part of this situation.

Representing differentiated, unique and exclusive examples of the (r)evolutionary phenomenon of neo-jihadism, Al Qaeda and Islamic State are characteristic of the mutually constitutive nature of ‘power and resistance’. Just as resistance movements throughout modern history come to resemble the forms of power they sought to overthrow, so too have Al Qaeda and Islamic State reconstituted the dominant political-economic paradigm of neoliberalism they mobilised in response to.