Punk Jihads: Immigrants, Sub-Cultures and Political Violence 1955-2001

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

This article will question some of the core assumptions surrounding current debates over immigration and citizenship. Throughout the last two decades public, academic and media discourses involving the social impact of mass immigration have tended to treat immigrants as uniform blocs, exclusively defined by their respective ethnic and religious backgrounds. Despite claims to the contrary, this reductive pattern has shaped policy-making in many European states. Major controversies involving immigrants such as violence between Turks and Kurds in Berlin or terrorist attacks in Britain are usually analysed exclusively through a religious or ethnic lens. As a result, state institutions and political parties in Western societies often make demands of entire ethnic and religious communities which their members find difficult to fulfil.
Such attitudes have partly been influenced by the fact that a considerable amount
of academic research examining immigration and political violence has neglected the internal social complexity of immigrant communities. Moreover, much of this research has ignored the ways in which different immigrant communities have evolved over time. However, this article will not just mount a sustained critique of this reductive immigration paradigm, it will also try to develop an alternative approach towards the analysis of the emergence of revolutionary Islamism within immigrant communities.
Over the last sixty years European states have seen the rapid expansion of an
extraordinary variety of sub-cultural groups whose members have deliberately tried to distance themselves from ‘mainstream’ society. Yet such sub-cultures as Punk, Skinhead or Goth still draw from a shared set of cultural symbols and traditions within the wider societies they claim to reject. This paper will therefore assert that the emergence of a wide variety of radical splinter groups within socially complex Muslim-majority communities is a process which has much in common with the emergence of such subcultures,which often possess their own cult of violence, in Europe and America between 1955 and 2001.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBetween the Avant-garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present
EditorsTimothy Brown, Lorena Anton
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherBerghahn Books
Pages132 - 144
Number of pages312
ISBN (Electronic)978-0-85745-079-1
ISBN (Print)978-0-85745-078-4
Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2011

Publication series

NameProtest, Culture and Society
PublisherBerghahn Books
Volume6

Keywords

  • Revolutionary groups
  • Islamism
  • Europe
  • Immigration
  • Terrorism

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