Okay, everybody, we've we've more or less resolved this.
That's what the visual problem and then the sound problem. So this is this is the difficulty of technology.
And in Oxford, I'm afraid. Anyway, it's my pleasure to introduce Professor Finding Sandberg, who's come to talk to us today about his research.
Simon is professor of criminology at the University of Oslo, and his research focuses on processes of marginalisation,
violence, masculinity, legal, illegal drugs, radicalisation and social movements.
His work falls within both Jersey and narrative criminology, and at the moment he is says, leading a research project.
Perhaps you're writing up your research project on radicalisation and resistance that explores the relationship between everyday religion,
extremism and street culture. So I'm very pleased its findings came all the way to talk to us.
[INAUDIBLE] talk for about an hour and then we'll have half an hour of questions at the end.
And he has a sort of multimedia presentation which some of which may work and some of which may not work.
It involves thinking with a laptop. So anyway, I'm sorry about the technology, but obviously thanks for inviting me.
It's my first time in Oxford, so I'm a little bit intimidated by the architecture,
but I'll do my best and my talk will be on what I describe as the street jihadi nexus.
So I focus on how street culture and extreme jihadi subcultures are connected in a radical hybrid street culture that poses a new threat in one way,
but also new limitations for extremist movements.
The work I will present today has been done in close collaboration with Sebastian To The Touch
and who is on the same project as me and Jonathan iGEM at the City University of London.
And the name of the big project is the radicalisation and resistance towards radicalisation.
So to talk and to talk I will start first by saying something about the phenomena where gangsters suddenly become jihadists and explain how
the way produced framework has been used in criminology and the way that the used in criminology can help us understand these processes.
I will then move on to two new empirical projects that emphasises resistance.
So that's how we that's why we have this name, radicalisation and resistance.
So we believe that we know a lot about and there's been a lot of studies about why people are radicalised, but we know less about why people don't.
So we want to look at that both in sprinkled culture and among ordinary Muslims.
So these two projects involve ethnographic fieldwork with Muslim street criminals on one hand,
and qualitative interviews with 90 young Muslims on the other side.
Previously, before starting this project, I've done some work on the Breivik terrorist attacks in in Norway a couple of years ago.
And I've also studied the European anti-Islamic movement a little bit.
But my main field of research for the last 15 years has been drug use, drug dealing, gangs and violence.
So at first sight, this might seem an odd background for studying political violence, but I do believe that it has something important to offer.
As terrorism studies. Criminology has something important to offer.
Terrorism studies, especially when we study foreign fighters and terrorists, socialised into street culture and drug use and street crime.
A criminology. A study has studied these groups of offenders for more than 100 years.
So in that sense, we are not new to this field and it's one of the other way around.
Terrorism scholars have started to be interested in the usual suspects of criminology in terrorism studies.
This is this phenomenon is known as the crime terror nexus.
It describes the linkages between organised criminal groups and terrorists,
and from terror nexus refers to terrorists using crime as a source of funding
and a partnership of organised criminal organisations and terrorist groups.
But I know in my book I point out a recent trend that.
When they describe how criminal and jihadi worlds merge and have come to recruits from the same pool of people,
creating often unintended synergies and overlaps that have consequences for how individuals radicalise and operate.
In Norway, for example, the Police Security Service states that 68% of jihadi radicals have,
prior to radicalisation, been suspected charge or sentenced for criminal acts, mostly violence and drug use.
And there are similar numbers in Sweden and several other European countries, including the UK.
So while this is nothing new, terrorist groups have always attracted young men fascinated by excitement and violence.
It seems to be a particularly distinct terroristic of recent waves of terrorism in Western
countries and also important characteristics of the foreign fighters going to Syria.
So there are many possible links between crime and terrorism.
Of course, it varies a lot with social, geographical and historical context.
So I would try to be a little bit more specific and discuss the possible links between Western street culture and street crime,
not crime in general, and violence, jihadi groups and symbolically, not terrorist groups in general.
So what is this street jihadi nexus? What I describe as a street jihadi nexus is an attempt to narrow down the crime terrorism
nexus or something more specific and understandable that can be studied empirically.
The street jihadi nexus is the relationship and symbolic merging of street culture and jihadi subculture, sometimes disguised as the new jihadi cool.
In short, this includes people the tendency to recruit from the same class of people as Basra and his colleagues emphasise clothes and style,
the mixing of military style, camouflage clothes, street style bling and traditional religious clothing.
Often it's all mixed at the same time. The street jihadi nexus can also be seen in slang,
the mixing in talk of standard sayings from the Koran with English versus open, inspired by gangster rap and gangster movies.
It all comes simultaneously when people talk and we can see this in chats and so on.
So, for example, when we are looking at the chats of the foreign fighters in Syria, one at home ask or why did you go to Syria?
To his friend who left? And he answers, It's Jihad Joe.
That's just kind of mixing in between all the religious reasons.
You can see the influence of this kind of street or traditional street culture.
Finally, there is a lot of cross references in music, for example, the paradoxical emergence of jihadist rappers.
So while music is forbidden among these Salafi jihadist, it still pops up the rappers who kind of play on the same ideology.
There's also a new tendency where references to Islam have started to appear in gangsta rap.
That shows how religion and criminal subcultures has got closer to Islam somehow has become something dangerous.
This strong symbol, a very potent symbol of something they should be afraid of,
and therefore so cool for these subcultures who celebrate danger and celebrate opposition and things that are different.
So it becomes attractive for excitements in the youth and those who want to provoke.
One example of this is the Norwegian rapper Camel.
Not very well known outside of Norway, not not even in Norway.
But all European countries have these rap scenes where people kind of look to the US and they try to imitate it as best as they can.
And in Norway, at least, they are well aware that they are not real gangsta rappers, but still try to come as close as they can and come in.
Who is one of the artists that comes the closest to the American stereotype?
He served prison time for attacking people with bricks and.
Once escaped from police station by jumping out of a window several floors above the ground.
And in a music video, I would play a little bit from afterwards.
The main point is seeing anything, which means to say nothing, don't say anything.
And he brags about how, when he's interrogated by the police, the files are completely empty.
He doesn't even say hi or anything.
So this is this kind of a standard of race and rule of street culture.
So so far, nothing unusual. But what's interesting in a clip that I would show is the pathway suddenly says to my mosque in France, Salaam alaikum.
This Arabic greetings, that means peace be unto you.
And it comes very much out of the blue in the video. Come in.
It's not a muslim. He doesn't have a muslim background. He doesn't have any sympathies for jihadist groups or anything like that.
But he still manages to fit in this greeting in the middle of the video.
So now this synchronisation starts. It takes.
Princess.
So the beginning arose this small scooter, which is an ironic reference to a classic gangster video where this guy is riding a huge motorbike.
So it's kind of ironic. It's the.
So this is slow in the U.S. needs to sit out west because he's got the Democrats so tied up that.
But when I see my son and my. Let's go to show me that this is not a Russian user.
So it's all this classic gaming box. That's a death sentence.
Massive, massive numbers in a bunch of stuff.
And then a little bit out of the blue, this greeting to his Muslim friends.
There's flow in the music. He starts by saying he beats the [INAUDIBLE] out of the wealthy boys.
It sounds better. And Norwegian. Your girlfriend's [INAUDIBLE] sucks.
Meaning that he had sex with her, so he knows. So all the classical references from gangsta rap.
And then your breath smells [INAUDIBLE]. And it finishes with saying what a mecum.
Which is the thing you used to get a better smell. And it's also the word he needs to rhyme with.
Salaam alaikum. So it's difficult to know where he picked up the phrase from,
maybe from some of his friends or maybe from the Nation of Islam who have certain street cred in the US.
But it reflects that Islam has become cool among ordinary, in ordinary street culture in the West,
and it's the same in Germany and other countries as well.
You have this emerging rappers that play more, much more actively on Islam than they've done before.
And if these guys are good at anything, it's like sensing the new trends.
What's coming up? What's the next cool thing? So it's a good way to kind of see and see the development of youth culture, I think.
So that's the one end of it. If we look at the other end of the continuum or what we call it,
we can also see the merging of the street culture and religion in the style and background of well-known Norwegian jihadists.
And this is the same thing for all over Europe. So as you can see from the picture,
they're all except this man here place on or use this or it's kind of related to a typical Western street culture bus gun muskets and
so back from from Latin America as was first the rapper for a couple of years and R.E.M. went to Syria and became a leader there.
His man, Ahmed, also typical background from street culture before he went to Syria and they're taught at Hama.
This guy was selling drugs in notorious drug dealer for many years and then he left.
And Kimberly, the last one, I guess he both of these has been on this camouflage thing and the scarf some and all of that.
And Kim leading in particular also shows how the converse has become an important part of the jihadi.
See, 25% of the people leaving for Syria from nowhere were Norwegian converts.
So they kind of had this position in regular street culture using a little bit of drugs, maybe involving a little bit of violence.
And then suddenly they turn to Islam and and go to Syria.
So, yeah, so there are two ways that Islam a street culture is combined.
On the one hand, in regular street culture, signs and symbols of Islam is used to appear cool and dangerous, as Kamal did in the video.
And on the other hand, jihadi groups use cultural expressions from street culture to attract youths.
You can see that there is videos, for example, of where they set up this very technically advanced and very detailed exhibition.
So violence that's kind of play into a popular culture where violence is celebrated and you can also see it in clothing and and so on.
So somehow these two cultures merges.
So what is this street culture then? The main idea in the literature is that marginalised groups will seek out alternative arenas where
they can succeed and traditionally criminal and subculture groups have provided such arenas.
To put it simply, if you can't manage school or get a regular job, maybe you have what it takes to sell drugs on the street.
And that can give you a lot of form, a sense of respect.
Then one value add in mainstream society, and these are just some of the main works within this tradition.
William Smith What was the classic here from Boston in the late 1930s?
Paul Willis Of course, which is more, much more in school, in a school setting,
but it still is this oppositional culture opposition to Main Street and middle class culture.
Anderson who has made it become the modern classic that everybody refers to with this concept of the cult of the street?
And Beauvoir was another big name and a tradition, and that's really in a suite here because they been working on it, too.
And of course, the last one, as Goffman, as you probably most of you know, has become really controversial,
fantastic book, but also very controversial because of her involvement with the people she studies.
So this is a highly empirical tradition, which is maybe why some of these books really get a broader distribution.
Some of them can be read more or less so exciting novels, especially The Venkatesh.
For those of you, the government became like a bestseller. While it's still based on this traditional classic streets, a number of things tradition.
So my contribution to this field has been a book we call The Street Capital that
I did with Will Patterson a couple years ago or actually many years ago now,
where we try to move from this empirical physics and also make it a turning into a more coherent theoretical framework for doing studies,
these kinds of studies. So in this book,
we try to explain the reasons for why a group of street drug dealers ended up
in criminal environments and the fascination and attractions of these things.
And again, it was based on a long and graphic fieldwork with these subcultures.
So the concept of street capital, it's the kind of the cultural capital of the street,
the knowledge, skills and objects that are given value in street culture.
For example, the experiences would use the sale of drugs, violence, crime and so on.
And the idea of using the concept of capital is to see that you can accumulate it.
You can have more of it and you can have less of it.
And it takes time. So in a same way as with money, for most of us, you can't just get it all in.
In one day. You have to work slowly and hard to get more and more in, and you can also lose it.
And it's also to capture this idea that there's some kind of investment.
You invest in your property just socialised into where you are, but you also invest in it like taking an education.
So as we do with the concept of cultural capital,
and it's the same way with the competencies you need to survive on the streets, you have to invest in it.
It takes time and you have to be careful to kind of protect it.
It's a related concept.
This street habitus, habitus and capital and body is closely related, and habitus is the embodied dispositions of people committed to the streets.
For example, embodied practices, practical sense that is seen in hypersensitivity to offences and frequent displays of violent potential.
For example, if you bump into someone, I guess the English are very good at excusing themselves.
So then it's kind of immediate response on impulse. You don't think about it.
Now it would be nice to be polite and say, I'm sorry.
I think the Scandinavians, they don't have that kind of politeness,
so they just try to hide and afterwards and in street culture, if you bump into someone,
the immediate response is, of course, to seek eye contact to see if this is like a potential conflict or if it's an offence,
if it was meant as some kind of a disrespect.
And if it is, it's of course, to bump back and take whatever steps necessary to provide your sense of of self.
And again, it's. Much embodied. You can't learn it.
You can't tell me to go out there and act like that because it happens like this, right?
So you need to really have it socialised and for many years to be able to pull it off and to look like you really fit into the environment.
So it takes time and it's it becomes you in a way that's difficult to change.
So because of the street capitalistic habitus is an attempt to kind of this practical rationality that for you
describes that combined structure and agency where you see how people act within the context that they are embedded.
So they're somehow rational or you can understand it.
It makes sense what they do, but it's within a given structure and it's not cognitively,
it's not rational choice in a way that people kind of weigh the advantages and disadvantages and so on.
And it's also, I think, a good way to combine cultural and economical explanations of street subcultures,
because on the one hand, it's a culture that has its own driving force that's kind of motivating people.
It takes particular directions, it shapes people, actions and so on.
But at the same time, it's also very much based on economy and socioeconomic marginalisation.
It's this attempt to find another space to get some kind of respect and dignity for a group of very marginalised people.
After this book, the the framework has been expanded.
We've written about the street feel. Capital is always situated in a particular field.
So if you talk about the capital, it's almost related to a field and that's pretty hard when it comes to a concept such as
street capital because it's not a particular institution and it's a particular place,
the street, it's like a metaphor for crime and a particular kind of crime, not any kind of crime to.
But still we try to describe the street, feel that it's somehow similar in very different countries and very different contexts.
Jonathan Legion has continued to work on street social capital to show how, in the same way as networking and so on is important for cultural capital.
Who knows who? Street social capital is important for people on the street,
and Jennifer Frequent has taken it even further and tried to combine it with the more constructivist perspectives.
And she describes narrative habitus as this kind of things you need to say in a way you need to talk, and so on, on the street.
Then together we also describe the narrative repertoire of the streets feels like quite recent paper,
which is it's a difficult exercise because it tries to combine some theoretical
perspectives that are not necessarily in line in narrative criminology,
which which is my other main interest, which basically says that stories are really important.
The stories people tell defines what they do and influences them and are important.
People act on good stories and various framework which somehow downplays the role of language,
saying that the most important things are the doxa things that are never said.
Yeah. And last week I was in Copenhagen and there was a new PSG that I was I was on the committee of How come Coca,
who has been doing a nine year fieldwork with immigrant gangs in Copenhagen and there was a thousand page speeches.
So I think the the tradition continues and becomes more more and more extreme.
But it's very it's a very good one.
I wish it was written in English so that if you read it, it's hopefully they would come some maybe smaller text from it to that.
Okay. So this framework of. But using criminology was the background for this recent work that I did with John Jones agent,
where we tried to understand this process where former gangsters, gangsters or people committed to some kind of street culture become jihadists.
So we thought, okay,
maybe we can use this concept so this framework to try to understand this apparent paradox where people move from very different cells.
But before coming to this, let's see. Take a look at how Islam used to be perceived in street culture.
I did the fieldwork in 2005 2006 when we wrote this book with ethnic minority drug dealers in Oslo.
And many of these had Muslim backgrounds. The young men were not very religious, but they did not eat pork.
Some wrote references to Islam on them, but still it was not very important for them.
So ten years ago, religious commitment was a clear sign of decreasing criminal activity.
Islam was their main reason for wanting to get out of the street, dealing crime and to settle down.
Religion was not an integrated part of youth culture. Rather, religion kept youths out of crime.
And basically criminals want to break with their lifestyle, settle down and get a family and get away.
And this can be illustrated by this quote from one of my main participants, Muhammad, who says, You got this sense of anxiety never leaves you.
Usually I just think about all the stuff I've done that I have to pay for one day, either in this life or the next.
I'm going to be judged. And it's my sense. I mean, this is.
And in a similar story from Frankfurt to another fantastic street ethnography, I think five years of of fieldwork with Turkish drug dealers.
It has not received much attention yet, but I think it's definitely should.
But the point here is that there she was also studying this group of dealers with Muslim backgrounds,
and she said that they didn't want to sell to women.
They preferred selling cannabis to selling harder drugs because they were Muslims.
That was the explanation or the justification or whatever it was.
And also that the treated money from drug business as hard and for us as impure.
And they argued that it could not be used in the of durable goods or saved for a future.
So we had this kind of discussion how how much is this really the influence of
Islam and how much is this just the case that no drug dealer ever talks to,
spent money on their mother or durable goods or save them for the future?
So maybe it's just an excuse for a very establish a new excuse for the established practice.
But the main impression, anyway, from both studies was a clear distinction between street culture and Islam.
Islam, it was something different. There was no other way out and getting straight,
no martyrdom that cleaned out sins or no religious groups to join where they could get credit for the street skills.
They then you had to make a clear break with criminal lifestyle to be considered risk Muslims.
She had a field work at the same time as ask me like ten year, 12 years ago.
Now this has changed. Violent jihadists now openly recruit people for street culture and play on street culture symbols to attract new members.
And maybe this can be understood better by using various concepts.
So only very briefly, this guy, you probably know Jihadi John was small for his age and bullied.
He had a long career of drug taking before they go into Syria, street crime and rough music.
He viewed themselves as part of the Faith Persecuted, and he was first drawn to a street culture and then drawn towards violent jihadism
and this kind of alternative search for respect provided by street capitalism.
Another guy very often, guys, is the Norwegian gang criminal up on.
But there is this before and after picture.
It was part of founding first, one of the big, most well-known and feared the gang criminals in Oslo,
and then later part of forming an extremist jihadist organisation in Norway.
And he was particularly good at recruiting new people and somehow became the leader or one of the most important guys in that organisation.
So but they transform street capital into resource in networks supportive of violent jihadism.
He was a tough guy about us in the first place and this was appreciated in jihadist circles.
People knew about his violent potential and his street capital made people respect him.
This also made him attractive for the jihadist because he had kind of the skills and
the habitus that they needed in their efforts for four terms to fight a holy war.
And while this was possible a couple of years ago, I think 15 years ago,
it would have been unthinkable to have a former well-known gang criminal without changing lifestyle,
that much becoming the main face of a religious organisation or groups.
So there was definitely something going on at that point, at that point in time.
Another guy, Biggie, was a gang leader and in points here is not this particular people.
I mean, there are just examples of a more general trend that also happens to people that are less well known in the public.
Gang leader in Copenhagen involved in drug dealing and trafficking.
He travelled to Syria to fight with the rebels to make up for his wrongs.
He really wanted to change his lifestyle. I think he tried and.
But the jihad. Fighting there sent him back. They didn't want him.
The writer wanted him to collect the money in the Copenhagen underworld.
So he transformed his capital into funding for jihadist groups instead.
And rumour says that he collected money from drug dealers to get to fund this.
Jihadists groups. People that owed him money.
He approached them, told him to pay back, and he sent the money to Syria instead.
Now he's marginalised in a Copenhagen underworld after having gotten some severe beatings by a rival gang.
So he somehow seems to be stuck in crime. Although he at some point tried to change.
So street capital a term explained both attraction to street culture, I think, and to jihadism.
There are some important similarities here. Street capital and the jihadi subculture, the jihadi cool has sometimes statements, for example,
described us that it does the jihadi could is based on marginalisation and it's all sorts of modernisation, social, economic, symbolic.
And what's important is that it is perceived marginalisation is the feeling of being an outsider.
A lot of people are if you look at the numbers or of objective characteristics, a lot of people are marginalised in many different ways.
But what's particularly for this group of people is that they kind of feel they feel it and
they interpret it as oppression from mainstream society or parts of mainstream society.
So it's also this kind of opposition going against society,
protesting against the marginalisation that they have experience somehow getting back at the society that they feel oppressed them.
Another similarities this attraction to alternative styles.
This is a picture of another guy who went to Syria who kind of tried all these different styles,
one after the other before he ended up in and jihadism.
And now it seems that the jihadi symbolic and semiotics and and all of that is has become another possible choice and a subculture.
The list of subcultures, anyone, any youth can actually relate to.
And there are ways of relating. I mean, you can become all engaged and and travel to Syria and so on, but you can also just play with it.
And we see that a lot. For example, young people putting up small, provocative things on their Facebook page just to see what happens,
takes some kind of sharing a video from ISIS or showing the flag or something like that.
Maybe they're only mean that much.
They don't put that much meaning into it, but it's just some kind of trying to play with some very provocative signs and symbols.
And maybe it's actually the most potent oppositional symbol right now, jihadism.
And finally, the attraction to violence, excitement, protest, masculinity is also to say in street culture and jihadism.
And this guy to the left here is another firefighter who first was doing boxing and Anna May and always had this thing about fighting and violence.
And in the end, he went to Syria to fight.
Probably partly driven by religious reasons, partly driven by social consciousness, political worries,
but also, I think, very clearly motivated by his kind of attraction towards violence and fighting and so on.
So street capital is embodied. This habitus that's difficult to change.
And in many new jihadis continued their street lifestyle after joining jihadist groups.
Maybe they don't want to change. Maybe they can't manage to change.
And one example here from another picture is Somalia.
Khan was posing in a gangster style away from from Syria and usually in pictures of foreign fighters or a terrorist, jihadi terrorist.
They are very serious when they pose with a weapons either like this or on the back or in their heart is kind of shows this this is a serious course.
We're not playing here. This is we have a violent potential. You should serious.
But this is serious and we are. But this kind of style of posing weapons is very common in American gangs, for example.
So this is just a clear copying of practices from American street gangster way of posing.
So they bring on their practices and it's hard to change because this is what they are used to.
So they can't just change overnight even if they want to.
And this can also be seen in the way many return to regular crime after having been jihadist for a while.
So it's not like they are involved in regular crime and then become jihadist and they turn to some other kind of crime.
But it's more like they become jihadist and then sometimes they go back to regular crime and they become jihadist again.
It's much more mixed, these practices.
So it's really difficult to turn away from this with practices when becoming engaged in extreme words and habits.
Is this is a nice way, I think, to conceptualise this lack of change or cultural continuity that creates the new hybrid culture.
So if we go to the literature, what really just extremists offer criminals,
they can offer them exciting experiences of group unity, love, power, violence and adventure.
Could see. And it says. They can offer them adrenaline, a strong identity and a sense of rebellion and being after establishment.
And it can also be this pride of being the worst of the worst being what Jackass describes as the badass.
And as I mentioned earlier, the jihadist or ISIS symbols are probably the most potent symbols of evil right now.
So if you want to if you're attracted to being the most evil person in the world, this is the kind of culture you would probably seek out.
At the same time, we have to remember that it's also offers this redemption from past sense.
So Lydia grew up in Manchester. It gives people a religious purpose in life.
And maybe if you have had a criminal lifestyle for a while and you have done a lot of wrong and maybe you feel bad about it,
you want to change life dramatically. You want to do something very grandiose to change, to show the world that you were changed.
So that can also be part of the picture. And finally, it's an opportunity to reinvest street capitalists and in jihadi organisations.
Street criminals don't have to start from scratch.
If they want to become a jihadist so they can reinvest their accumulated street capital in a more and moral handover.
And in this way, their street habitus becomes a resource and not a problem.
So for these people who have been socialised into street culture for years and street environments, if they want to change and go somewhere else,
if they want to go to mainstream society, their habitus, their knowledge, their way of talking, everything is against them.
And it would be really hard to get any kind of position if they want to change lifestyle.
But and ten, 50 years ago, that was the only option they'd seen.
But now there is this other options where you can kind of go to an extreme religious movement and hang on to your street habitus,
hang on to your competencies and be acknowledged for it and go from having high status in one system to having high status in another.
So in that sense, and that's the practical rationality that the body describes, it's not like they put up the question and makes a decision to go,
but it's just this kind of it expands some of the draw of these movements that don't
have to give up all their competencies and capital and knowledge when they move it.
There's some kind of cultural homology from one culture to the other that's probably appreciated and makes the most users easier.
But the limitations, or whatever we call it, numbers are uncertain.
So when I say that this has become more important,
it's that we don't really know that for sure because we didn't count them in the sixties and seventies.
So it's not like anyone have numbers of people being convicted of crime prior to political or religious radicalisation from the sixties and seventies.
And also now it's a little bit difficult to how you measure it, what kind of crimes and so on.
So and numbers are not certain, but most people and most researchers in this field still agree that there seems to be a tendency in that direction.
And also whether it's 30%, 60% or 80% or whatever, it's an interesting phenomena for that group of people that it matters for relates to.
So I think even if it's even if it's just one fourth of of new jihadists, it's important to try to see what happens with this group.
And it's also not a new phenomena.
There's always been criminals engaged in terrorist organisations and similar types of people have been drawn towards these groups.
We've seen this in Iraq, in the IRA and so on.
And finally, street criminals are not jihadi entrepreneurs, which is maybe the most important criticism of this idea of a street crime terror nexus.
And according to Peter Nasser, one of the. Big scholars in this field.
Marginalised people are not the ones initiating terrorism.
Rather, they are played by and manipulated by what he describes as ideologists and entrepreneurs.
So in that sense, they are not the most important actors when explaining or trying to prevent terrorism.
He shows how he has plotted all the terrorist attacks in Europe from the ninth
jihadi terrorist attacks in years in Europe from the seventies and until now,
not only the attacks, but also the plots that were discovered by the police.
And he argues that it all comes down to this network in London and Paris with maybe around 150 hardcore jihadists.
And their ideology is really important.
Of course, still, I would say that if it's the misfits, as he described them, he describes all the different roles in the jihadi terrorist network.
If it is the misfits that actually commit the terrorist attacks, I would still argue that they are very important parts of it.
And also, if they explain the rise in recruitment, if they are the new recruits,
it can be that these basic networks are kind of expanding the system the way this is systematic and going on and over time and so on.
But if the new thing is the rise of street criminals coming in, we should try to understand it better.
So the street jihadi nexus has some kind of interest there.
The last decade has seen a rise in jihadi violence in the West.
Most of it is perpetrated by young Muslim men from the West, and they have often developed the violent skills in Western street culture and prisons.
So in short, drug users, petty and more hardcore criminals have become the main recruitment base for jihadi groups.
And this makes it crucial to understand how jihadi groups and jihadi rhetoric are dealt with and perceived in these environments.
So this is the starting point from when you don't have that much.
You got 10 minutes to know when it's okay. He should've never told me to expand.
That was a big mistake. I'll go fast.
The new field work. Same scene. So the idea.
Okay, if this is where people are recruits.
We know a lot about jihadis, but we don't know much about these scenes where they're recruits and how ordinary street criminals relate to jihadists.
So in a new project, Sebastian two times went back to the scene where I did my research ten years ago,
and we wanted to see how street culture had changed the last ten years.
So the first striking observation was that the religion had become much more important.
Everything else was the same. They took the drugs in the same way they were fighting, in the same way they were saying the same kind of things.
They even had the same, like, pop culture references.
But and this violence with culture was still dominant, but the religions became had become much more important.
They were constantly discussing religions while religion was dealing drugs and describing each other in religious terms.
So with a background of knowing that this is where they recruited, we wondered how they must have straight criminals view violent jihadists.
And given what I've talked about so far, the expectation was that they have some kind of fascinations border violence spectacles,
that there is some kind of recognition of the opposition or maybe not that they really identify with it 100%,
but have some kind of some kind of fascination for it.
But what we found was a very strong and clear resistance, which can be seen in this quote,
which it's written in big letters, because he's kind of shouting it to Sebastian.
He approached a drug dealer explaining the research project, and the response was very emotional.
It refers to that guy with a bomb. There was a guy who had made a bomb and it just a couple of hundred metres away.
And he says he wants to kill them. And he points to this as those sort of people recruiting and so on.
If I was allowed to punch this in the air and so on.
So the first answer to that is first, how do they relate to this jihadist group is that they are strongly opposed to it.
And it's not an abstract problem for these young men and it's environments.
They know people who have travelled. They know recruiters who have approached them and so on.
And because they are so close to the problem and we think that there is some really effective de-radicalization work going on at these sites,
and it's important to study and work with people from every culture and work within the street cultural logic to understand it,
to constrain extremism and the problem of jihadis targeting these people.
So there are, of course, differences as well between sweet culture and jihadi cultures.
It's obvious that it is culture against the very hard nosed stick one one who uses a lot of jokes and anyone who says you shouldn't use drugs,
sexual access versus sexual limitations.
But there are also reasons to resist jihadism, and that's embedded in in the street culture logic.
So one thing you can say is that extremist does not have street capital.
That was one of the reason they gave for being opposed to it. The jihadists are not following the code on the streets.
So if we start from this assumption that everybody has some kind of morality.
Even criminals, street drug dealers, the first statement there is that why should they kill innocent?
So it is kind of very mainstream idea that killing innocent people is not it's not allowed or more morally defensible.
But the other one citation shows some more cultural logic embedded in the street street culture.
Don't use a noise if you're going to fight unless Delta One has one. It doesn't give any threat to attack innocent people.
Doesn't give on purpose to to attack all the.
You should try to find someone your own size, or preferably even bigger.
And then if you fight them, you get more to capital.
You can even be beating them up and get street capital if you just show that you're not a car was running away and so on.
So the terrible idea is terrorism or blowing up the bombs, killing innocent people doesn't really resonate with street culture,
doesn't resonate with ideas of masculinity in street culture.
So that's one reason why they rejected it. Also, the resistance is highly emotional.
There are psychopathic, not normal. Humans is as they get good red eyes when they speak their souls that they have drunk lots of blood.
So somehow the most emotional responses we got were from this.
They were much more emotional about it than regular Muslims, and that probably reflects that.
They feel more they feel the stigma more.
It's kind of they've always been stigmatised for being drug dealers, being ethnic minorities and so on.
But now they're also possibly terrorists.
So it becomes really important to draw the boundaries, to say to everyone that, oh, well, I'm not one of them.
And we know that well, from the symbolic boundary literature, that's the strongest.
The boundaries are always drawn against the ones that are closest to you, which is the one you need to.
We see that the negative is the one that is the one you need to show that they are not.
Yeah, but the emotional response has got two sides to it.
Negative one, of course it can justify beating them up can be used as a justification for whatever violence,
if you accuse them of being supportive of ISIS and so on.
We have seen that in gunfights in and in Norway, where the one group accused the other one of being like sympathising with ISIS.
And that probably explains why the violence got even greater than it would have been otherwise.
And it's kind of the humanisation. It's always dangerous.
It's easier to kill people or to harm people that becomes representatives of evil and were not considered to be human.
But it has also got a positive side to it, to emotional resistance, and that is that it can justify snitching and violence.
It can make participants in the street culture break with the most important rule You shall not snitch.
And during my previous fieldwork and many years of interviewing all kinds of drug dealers.
I can hardly remember anyone admitting to snitching.
They could admit to. To selling drugs, of course.
Show me the roots where they have smuggled and violence, beating up people, getting beaten, but never snitching.
It is still in this new data. We have examples of people saying that they were the snitch, this guy here.
So since many extremists now come from these environments, a good relationship to them is,
of course, beneficial when it comes to getting information about potential radicalised individuals.
So other reasons for not being attracted to jihadist organisations are more mainstream.
Once extremist message to further Islam, extremists bring disrepute to Islam and Muslims.
They inflict suffering. They are mad certain, but this is very much the same as the reasons we've found among ordinary Muslims.
So. This can be some kind of reminder that these differences are not always important,
and even highly violent subcultures share many of the same values as more mainstream society.
So this is where I wanted to squeeze in the last study, but I want but we did this interviews and we had a media campaign.
If some of you want to see them, it's under the Muslim voices without speaking the words and so on.
So I just want to just skip that.
But what's important for street culture and the argument in this talk is that the
main perceptions of jihadists among ordinary Muslims is that they are criminals,
they're drug users, they're uneducated, and they have psychological problems.
Brainwashed once said he's a psychopath.
One young Muslim said about his former friend who went to Syria.
They're crazy. Many of our travels are criminals.
They've only been Muslim for two, three months. I think they are not for.
But they don't know much about the parents.
Maybe lost their parents, never been to school.
So when ISIS got too closely connected to or associated with a violent Western subculture, it limited mainstream left support.
They got associated to this because the large number of former criminals and drug users that travelled to Syria,
they also actively tried to put this group by playing on street cultural symbolic.
But in terms of recruitment, the symbolic associations of the street is this is an ambiguous resource.
It attracts some but repels more. Few want to be associated with the likes of Jihadi John and other notorious criminals.
And more generally, although there is some fascination in popular culture, this is a highly marginalised and stigmatised subculture.
So to conclude, the street jihadi culture changes Western street culture.
It makes Islam as something dangerous and cool. It attracts new recruits to jihadism.
These are young excitement seekers concerned with style and searching for action, and they often have a long career in regular crime.
And the new street jihadi culture offers a more a way out for hardened criminals.
It's a space where they can get status for their human backgrounds as opposed to almost anywhere else in society.
And finally, it shapes and transforms the way that jihadi group works.
For example, ISIS, many provocations, extreme videos and stories that must be understood within this subculture in reverse.
Still, while all of this is true, it's important to remember that there is.
It's a long way from street culture to violent jihadism, and the overwhelming majority are not drawn towards it.
At least that's what our data indicates.
And this, maybe more importantly, this resistance that emerges from the street is probably more important than the
kind of counter-radicalization efforts done by the government or of municipalities,
sort of police or all of these other agents that are trying to fight terror or extremism,
because people will listen more to their friends, listen more to the cultural codes in the environment they are in and so on.
And it's also a very practical thing where you can play on this resistance to get information and so on.
So jihadi groups, association to street culture finally make mainstream mobilisation more difficult.
It it kind of limits, while it's a way to get new members is also is also a very effective way to stop more broad and mainstream mobilisation.
Very few Salafi or conservative or highly religious people will want to be associated with a group of former drug users and street criminals.
So when that becomes the face of a movement, it's a way of getting very highly potentially violent people that can fight then all of that,
but are also a way to to make it stay within that group.
So what not. My last slide.
So there's been a downfall of ISIS and somehow jihadism since seems to be a little bit out of fashion and it's not that important anymore.
It's lost some kind of momentum with the downfall of ISIS.
But I think the mechanisms described are very similar to other kinds of political and religious movements or radical lawlessness.
Right wing extremism, for example, we know have always attracted criminals for exactly the same reasons and also may be left wing and extremists.
And extremism has done the same.
And someone told me now that left wing extremist means the most violent in in northern Europe because they attack right wing extremists.
But the right wing extremists won't tell the police or anyone else because it's ruins their self image.
They don't want to be portrayed as as victims.
So I hope that the ideas, the concepts the processes describe is not about jihadism or Islam, as with culture,
but it's more generally about the movement from regular street crime and street culture to religious and political movements.
Thanks.