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New Reports

My brilliant friend and countryman Jacob Høigilt has just written an absolutely fascinating report on Islamism and Education in the Palestinian Territories. It’s fieldwork-based, rich  and nuanced, and it undermines widespread assumptions about the link between Islamic education and militancy.

While I am at it, I might as well mention my own completely unrelated CTC paper on the Failure of Jihad in Saudi Arabia.

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5 Responses

  1. Hi Thomas. I just read your new CTC piece and find it to be outstanding, as usual. Furthermore, it only encourages me to get your new book straight away.

    Only one subsidiary point that I’d quibble with in your article. You suggest that the “soft” aspects of Saudi Arabia’s campaign against AQAP were what made it particularly successful. I wouldn’t suggest that they weren’t a good idea. However, it does seem to me that, at least from the jihadi point of view, governmental campaigns in other Arab countries which did not use these “soft” measures have been comparably effective. Therefore, I’m not so sure that these Saudi efforts were more or especially effective. More humanitarian yes. More effective? I don’t see it.

    Perhaps you have thoughts on this?

  2. Mark,
    I am glad you liked the report. You are right that tougher approaches have produced similar results, if by result we mean state victory. But those results have often come at a much higher price in terms of lives, economic losses and political instability. While the scale of the damage in 1990s Egypt, Algeria etc can undoubtedly be ascribed to larger rebel capability at the outset, I would argue that indiscriminate repression escalated those insurgencies in the early stages, making the conflicts longer and bloodier than necessary. This could very well have happened in Saudi Arabia but it didn’t. That’s what I mean by effective. I should probably have made it clearer in the manuscript.

  3. No idea I am afraid – it worked fine on my computer. I have now uploaded the pdf on the Jihadica site. You can also try getting the file from the CTC website (www.ctc.usma.edu).

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