ABSTRACT
The deradicalization and disengagement literature has to date tended to focus on disrupting the mechanisms that create loyalty to a small group and how to counter these (Horgan 2005; Sageman 2008; Bjørgo 2009; Noricks 2009; Barrelle 2015; Hwang 2015; Nesser 2015; Horgan, Altier, Shortland and Taylor 2017; Kruglanski, Jasko, Chernikova, Dugas and Webber 2017). In large part, these discussions have focused on situations where adherents were organized in small groups, rather than being a part of a wider and stronger organization. Moreover, these small groups were operating in a state with functioning institutions focusing on identifying, arresting and/or deradicalizing/disengaging those radicalized individuals (Hansen 2017). Al Qaeda’s attack on 11 September 2001 had set the focus on militant religiously inspired organizations and loose networks; future religiously inspired radicalism was seen by some as leaderless networks, by others as clandestine networks implementing terror (Sageman 2004, 2008). The territorial expansion of the Islamic State in many ways contributed to a change in the focus on jihadist organizations as clandestine illegal networks, as the wider field re-discovered that jihadist organizations could establish forms of territorial control, extraction and discipline mechanisms that go together with such control (Lia 2015; Hansen 2019).
