ABSTRACT
It is not uncommon for terrorist groups to be compared to street gangs, yet it has only been in recent years that scholars (Curry, 2011; Decker & Pyrooz, 2011, 2015) have begun to compare and contrast the archetypes of these two violent groups. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria 2 (ISIS), like many street gangs, is the offspring of sectarian conflict. Addressing Decker and Pyrooz’s (2011, 2015) call for greater conceptual clarity and more comparative research between terrorist groups and violent street gangs, the current chapter 3 uses ISIS as a case study to better understand a modern terrorist group by applying nearly a century of gang research. Decker and Pyrooz (2011, p. 161) attest that “developing fixed images of groups, their activities, structures, and processes will likely lead to errors in assessing their danger.” At its foundation ISIS remains a violent extremist organisation, yet, ISIS is “something qualitatively more significant than a terrorist organization” (Lister, 2015, pp. 51), and as noted by Byman (2015a, p.1):
It is best to think of the Islamic State as an amalgam, bringing together the characteristics of many different types of actors—some legitimate, some downright evil—but with no single label doing the job.
