Engineers of Jihad

Is there a common educational background to individuals who join Muslim militant organizations? Are militants really losers at the margins of their societies, failed petty criminals and former “sinners” who then “found the light” and adopted a militant form of religion to atone? Are there commonalities between Muslim and non-Muslim, far right-wing militants in North America and Europe? These are some of the questions at the heart of Gambetta and Hertog’s fascinating new study, many years in the making. The book differs from existing studies on militant Islamism that focus primarily on ideology or tracing the histories of specific organizations, providing a data-heavy study that seeks to explain the educational backgrounds among different sets of militants and possible explanations for differences and similarities. Analysing a dataset of over 4,000 individual militants active across the world including both in Muslim majority and non-Muslim majority countries, the two argue, based on their findings, that individuals with a higher education background in engineering are significantly overrepresented among militant Islamists with nearly 45% (44.9%) of those in Muslim majority countries having studied the subject with a similar number (45.1%) among Western militants.....