The Family Context and It's Role in Making Jihadists: The Case of Jihadist Families in Indonesia

Abstract

The role of families in producing terrorists is much debated among scholars and counter-terrorism officials. While many experts acknowledge that families are important to creating the conditions that lead to an individual's involvement violent extremism. This is especially so for those who are members of families that have a history of radicalism. But few scholars studied families where the parents have disengaged from jihadism or have never been jihadist or even devoutly religious. What is the impact of these family environments on radicalising their offspring? This thesis uses psychosocial methods to examine different types of families in order to analyse what affect varying conditions within those families will have upon the radicalisation and terrorist involvement of younger members. Using data from in-depth interviews with, and observations of, 31 families of jihadists and convicted terrorists from across Java, Indonesia, my study argues that family context is important in creating conditions for early radicalisation via the transmission of values and behaviour that create a form of 'ready loyalty' or fidelity. Such fidelity is crucial to explaining whether someone becomes a jihadist or terrorist. In so doing, this thesis fills gaps within the scholarly literature on families and extremism. I categorise the families into three groups. The first I call Active Jihadist families because parents or other influential family members have ongoing involvement in a radical activity and have had sons convicted of jihadism. The second type of family is termed Inactive Jihadist and comprise parents who have had historical involvement in radical activity but have disengaged either ideologically or organisationally, and whose children have not become jihadists. The third type is the Non-Jihadist family, which, as the name suggests, has parents with no historical involvement in radical activity but nonetheless have had sons convicted of terrorism. With this categorisation of families, I set out the risk factors relating to the possibility of a family member being either more disposed to becoming a terrorist or able to resist extreme radicalisation. My analysis of these families focuses in particular, on the socialisation of values between parents and children, including values either accepting or rejecting violence extremism. This thesis draws on Erikson's concept of 'fidelity', which refers to the need to be loyal to someone. Families create conditions in which fidelity toward jihadism can lead individuals to radicalise early in life, particularly so for those coming from Active Jihadist families. For Inactive Jihadist families, the values transmitted to the children incline against involvement in jihadism. By contrast, individuals coming from Non-Jihadist families receive no grounding in jihadist thinking and have familiarity with jihadist leaders or organisations. In these cases, there is usually no explicit socialisation taking place and thus fidelity was not created between children and parents. This leaves the children vulnerable to external influences which in some cases results in them become jihadists. Many of these Non-Jihadist families are dysfunctional, which inhibits parent-child socialisation.