A new journal article lands at last in African Security, written in conjunction with Lorenzo and Evan, looking at al Shabaab and their internationalization. The article offers something of an overview of the phenomenon with particular focus on the various nations where fighters have come from in the West. This is a topic I have written a bit about before, and about which I have more things coming. Unfortunately, it is behind a firewall, but if you drop me a note through the contact page I can probably help out. In the meantime, here is the abstract:
Sacralization of conflict is the process through which religion, or, in most cases, a militant interpretation of it, evolves from being an irrelevant or secondary factor at the onset of a conflict to shaping the views, actions, and aims of one or more of the conflict’s key actors. The article outlines how this phenomenon has taken place in Somalia over the past twenty years by looking at two related phenomena: (1) the rise to prominence of al Shabaab, a group that, unlike its predecessors, follows a global jihadist ideology, and (2) the arrival of foreign fighters, particularly from Western countries, attracted more by global jihadist ideology than ethnic ties or nationalist sentiments.
Keywords: al Shabaab; Somalia; sacralization; radicalization; foreign fighters; al Qaeda; diaspora
Raffaello Pantucci 
[…] of the clerics I refer to below, this for more on the pipelines of people going back and forth and this and this for bigger views of Shabaab’s internationalization (many of those I now realize are […]