The Radical Redemption Model

Abstract

What do convicted terrorists really believe when they say they committed their acts in the name of a higher authority? This book deploys a cutting-edge combined approach of (oral) history and social psychology toward religiously inspired terrorism, and develops a radical redemption model. Beatrice de Graaf went into prisons to talk to terrorist convicts. She listened to their stories about their frustration with their own lives, their anger at injustices done to them, and their decision to join the terrorist fight, and she questioned them specifically about their extreme beliefs. The stories they told her reveal that the actual, lived and believed practice of radical redemption is crucial to understanding terrorists’ actions. On the basis of interviews with terrorist detainees from the Netherlands, Syria, Pakistan, and Indonesia—mostly jihadists and some right-wing extremists—life stories of surrender, struggle, sacrifice, and redemption are reconstructed. In this way, the nexus between extreme beliefs and terrorist activity is unraveled, and a grounded theory of radical redemption is developed. In addition, important questions are explored; for example, when and how do radical religious and ideological beliefs inspire and trigger people to engage in a holy war? And what happens when the longed-for redemption fails to materialize? This book combines historical research and a deep reading of past incidents of terrorist actions with insights gleaned from the interviews with current-generation terrorists, pivoting around the notion of the terrorists’ extreme beliefs. It is a history of the most recent period of terrorist violence, but it also offers a new understanding of the elusive and perennial connection between religion and violence, between radical beliefs and terrorism.