Unrooted Cosmopolitans: A Global Sociology of Foreign Fighters

• In Event: 474 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 19. Transnational Activism

Abstract

The paper’s founding premise is that Islamist foreign fighting is a form of global political activism, but not only that: it is perhaps the most globally mobile form of political activism today. We contend that the phenomenon of foreign fighting has not yet received sufficient attention from the community of sociologists. The paper advances two core claims: (1) That foreign fighter activism is not a fixed identity and political category, but one that may over time transpose trans-spatially from and into other forms of political engagement and activism; and that (2) this activism must be understood and analyzed in the context of a global political Islamist grievance community where moral-political allegiances and objectives are connected to supranational collectives and ideologies, rather than to national ones. The goal of the paper is to theoretically and analytically connect these claims.

Authors

• Thomas Olesen, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University

• Jasper Schwampe