The entanglement of Jihad, political violence, and media has determined the lives of Muslims in Europe and the US over the past 20 years. This book unravels the nexus of these elements to critically examine how their conjunction is perpetuated, reproduced, or disputed. In 16 case studies, the contributors critically reflect on the identification of jihad with political violence, address the academic, legal, political and broader public production of knowledge on this topic, examine the aesthetic formations involved in the mediation and reaffirmation of this narrow understanding, explore the experiential worlds of people whose ideas and actions are labelled as and affected by notions of violent jihad, and illuminate the institutional and media contexts (e.g. of archives) in which an entanglement of jihad and political violence takes effect, with profound consequences. This volume decentres dominant discourses on so-called jihadist actors and deradicalization contexts to offer more nuanced understandings of the political and socio-cultural contexts.

A rich collection of thought-provoking contributions on jihadism and its place in Western discourse. -- Thomas Hegghammer, Oxford University

Simone Pfeifer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Training Group anschließen-ausschließen: Cultural Dynamics Beyond Globalized Networks at the University of Cologne. She is a social and cultural anthropologist with a focus on visual, digital and media anthropology. Her research interests include transnational migration and mobility in postmigrant contexts, political violence, religion, and artistic practices, and ethics in (digital) ethnographic research. Her recent publications include Social Media im transnationalen Alltag (2020, transcript), the co-edited volume Jihadi Audiovisuality and its Entanglements: Meanings, Aesthetics, Appropriations (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) with Christoph Günther, and the co-edited special section Dark Ethnographies? (ZfE 2021: 146). Christoph Günther is the Principal Investigator of the junior research group Jihadism on the Internet: Images and Videos, their Dissemination and Appropriation in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. Having a background in Islamic Studies, his research interests include religio-political movements in the modern Middle East, visual cultures and iconography, and the sociology of religion. He is the author of Entrepreneurs of Identity: The Islamic State’s Symbolic Repertoire (Berghahn Books, 2022) and has co-edited Jihadi Audiovisuality and its Entanglements: Meanings, Aesthetics, Appropriations (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) with Simone Pfeifer. Robert Dörre is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the field of media cultural studies at the department for Theory, Aesthetics and Politics of Digital Media at Ruhr University Bochum. His research interests comprise digital culture and social media, media relations between visibility and violence, affect theory, media as intervening agencies and VR films. In his PhD thesis, he addressed forms of audiovisual self-documentation in social media. The resulting book was published by Büchner-Verlag in 2022 under the title Mediale Entwürfe des Selbst.