Religious Redemption as the Motivation for the Jihadist Crime-Terrorism Nexus: A Critical Inquiry
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In their influential article on the “crime-terror nexus” Basra and Neumann state that “jihadism can affect a criminal’s radicalisation process in two ways: it can offer redemption from past sins, or it can legitimise crime.” During their analysis, though, the two interpretive options become in effect one, reflecting the dominant orientation to the continuity of criminality and terrorism (religious or otherwise) as social phenomena. Examining the work of Basra and Neumann, and others addressing the issue, this article argues for a crucial aspect of discontinuity between some jihadists’ terrorist commitments and their criminal pasts. The redemptive motivation for turning from criminality to jihadism warrants being analyzed more fully and carefully to better explain why only a handful of individuals with a criminal background become jihadists. Crucially, for example, and contrary to a prevailing narrative in the literature, jihadists appear to prioritize seeking redemption for their sins, as defined by their religion, rather than for crimes, as delineated by secular society. Fully recognizing and investigating the “definition of the situation” that Western Muslim criminals and jihadist recruiters share is essential to understanding the motivations for the nexus in many instances, and thus grasping how best to counter it.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it