Re-examining the explanations of convert radicalization in Salafi-Jihadist terrorism with evidence from Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evidence from multiple sources suggests converts to Islam are significantly overrepresented in the ranks of Salafi-jihadist terrorists. Researchers have been speculating for some time why this might be the case. This paper identifies, and critically examines, four hypothetical explanations commonly found in the literature: (1) some explanations focus on the significance of prior personal characteristics of the converts; (2) some explanations emphasize the rapidity of the movement from conversion to radicalization; (3) some explanations highlight the lack of religious knowledge on the part of radicalized converts; and (4) some explanations point to the role of the zealotry of converts. Examining each explanation, we find the causal mechanisms hypothesized are inadequate and the hypotheses are incongruent with the data we have collected on radicalized Canadian converts. In the end, we offer an alternative hypothesis, based on the analysis of the response of radicalized converts to an experience of disappointment that is common in the post-conversion period.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".