The Individual Disengagement of Avengers, Nationalists, and Jihadists : Why Ex-Militants Choose to Abandon Violence in the North Caucasus
Abstrakt
Drawing on a range of hitherto unknown first-hand data, this book is the first of its kind to offer an explanation of the incentives of various types of militants - avengers, nationalists, and jihadists - to abandon violence. Empirically, the monograph problematizes the established view of North Caucasian militants as a monolithic category of 'Islamic terrorists.' Theoretically, it points out that distinct types of insurgents are variously resilient to external and internal pressures - such as group membership and social bonds, (in)discriminativeness of violence and hidden identities, ideology and beyond - to individual disengagement.
The study posits that stronger adherence to ideology, higher lethality rates and indiscriminativeness of violence, interrupted social links, and stonger group membership renders jihadists, followed by nationalists, and in contrast to avengers, the less likely category of militants to seek individual disengagement.