The outbursts of violence, clashes and strife between Sunnis and Shi'ites in the wake of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, had two important repercussions for modern Jihadism. First, it catalyzed a new jihadist wave of fighters and increased the militancy of the homegrown Sunni Arab insurgency which played a key role in creating alliances between local Sunni insurgents and transnational Salafi jihadists, under the aegis of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM), the predecessor of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). Secondly, through its blend of chauvinistic Sunni Arab nationalism and Sunni extremist aversion towards both western colonialism and Shi'ism, the emergence of this new wave of jihadism served as an impetus for an explosive spawning of a new theology of jihad held together by two components: (a) politics of friends and enemies (wala’ wa-l bara’) and (b) the sanctions and the moral basis of the Islamic body politics (hud?d, qas?s, ta`z?r, enslavement, etc.). Taking these two components into account, the purpose of this paper is as follows: first, to show how this new theology of jihad helped to provide much of the immediate framework within which a transnational Sunni - rather than PanIslamic - identity was promulgated; secondly, to outline the most salient features of this overtly sectarian current found in the new theology of jihad with focus on its ideology of resistance and khil?fa-building project; try to trace the roots of these new components, both by showing how this theology of jihad reconceptualize classical discussions of takfir and also to show what rhetorical means this theology uses in order to present these innovations as firmly anchored in tradition; to attempt to explain why this theology develops at this particular time and place, and thereby contribute some further methodological reflections on the changing nature of Jihadi-Salafism; to challenge the relatively widespread paradigm that the 'Islamist Ideology' or the 'Jihadist Ideology' promote certain sets of doctrines in isolation from their surroundings, and to suggest that jihadist theology always develops in a changing context.

From Local to Global: The Expansion of Transnational Jihadist Conflicts In 2018, civil wars between local governments and official branches of the so-called Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda (AQ) were ongoing in several countries of the Arab world, namely Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Moreover, both Afghanistan and Pakistan have been experiencing armed conflicts with AQ and IS involvement over the past years. This is a remarkable difference if compared with the situation ten years prior, in 2008, when IS did not yet exist, and AQ’s Algerian and Iraqi branches were the only ones, outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan, waging armed conflicts against local governments (Pettersson, Högbladh, and Öberg 2019). Despite the expansion of this type of conflict, research on the factors associated with its appearance is still scarce. Thus, we still do not know why these conflicts appear in some locations, but not in others. This study addresses this lacuna through a quantitative methodological approach, investigating a range of possible explanatory factors. Special attention is paid to processes of spatial contagion across state borders as well as the role played by local Islamist insurgent groups, which have sometimes paved the way for AQ and IS gaining ground, but in other cases did not join the transnational struggle.

The expansion of transnational jihadist network is often analyzed through the lens of identity politics or as some describe it as sectarianism: by appealing to the identity of individuals and/or groups they can be mobilized in conflicts with other individuals/groups initializing a dynamic that is very difficult to contain and which has an outreach beyond borders. In his controversial book on clash between civilizations Samuel P. Huntington analyzed this dynamic related to what he called fault line wars. But as he never succeeded in developing a theoretical framework to understand ‘civilization’, an accurate understanding of the concept of ‘identity’ in analyzing identity politics or sectarianism is despite many attempts missing. Departing from a critique of the cartesian interpretation of identity as a ‘thing’, something one can gain or lose, this paper argues with reference to Th. W. Adorno (Negative Dialektik) and Martin Heidegger (Identität und Differenz) for a definition of identity as relation that frames a certain worldview as an outcome of what is defined as a desire for order. This worldview develops as an interplay between ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizons of future expectations’ (R. Koselleck). The dynamic creates worldviews that comprise both emotions, intuitions and Intellectual categories. Worldviews can be promoted in founding narratives that could take shape of narratives of national identity, insurgent ideology or promotion of so-called grounding cultural values, i.e. WASP values in the US or sharia in al-Qaida. Identity politics or sectarianism can be analyzed as competition between these worldviews that under certain condition can intensify into violent conflicts. Based on government documents, academic literature, and sources gathered in field study, the paper will use the developed theoretical framework to analyze three cases: (1) the debate of the return of foreign fighters from Syria / Iraq to Denmark, (2) the internal debates and conflicts in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the Philippines, and (3) the Chinese policy targeting the Uighurs in the Xinjiang province after the 2009 Urumqi clashes.