1 To fight terrorism we have to identify the reasons for it, knowing in advance that there is obviously no single cause but instead a range of factors and motivations that differ between individual cases and countries. Our research does not focus on terrorism in general, or on the relationship between Islam and violence, but on a specific category of militants who live in Europe and either commit attacks here or leave for jihad in Syria or Iraq.

2 We have a major data source: a list, with biographies, of terrorists active in the West. Practically all the perpetrators of the attacks planned or carried out in Europe and the United States have been identified by the police, and their lives have been more or less fully described by journalists. For good reasons or bad, journalists have easy access to judicial and police sources, and do not hesitate to publish them. From a methodological point of view, there is no need for lengthy field investigations in order to understand the trajectory of these terrorists' lives. We have the material and the profiles. The problem comes when we try to understand their motivations.

3 Of course, there is another methodological problem: who counts as a terrorist? If we can agree that the Bataclan and the Charlie Hebdo killers fall into this category—defined, in these cases, by the sort of action they perpetrated—are all the aspirants to jihad who leave for the Syrian front terrorists? Many, but not all, terrorists go through a jihadist phase, but not all jihadists are destined to become terrorists, if only because it seems that ISIS quickly separates them into those who are to be sent back to the West after training and those chosen for suicide attacks on the battlefield. But precisely because foreign volunteers who go to Syria are preferred for suicide attacks, and because almost all terrorists operating in Europe today will die in action, the two categories align on at least one point: voluntary death. Today, we can assume that terrorists are a subset of jihadists. This has not always been the case: the international jihadists of the 1980s who went to Afghanistan did not use kamikaze techniques in combat and did not commit terrorist acts in the West, and the members of convicted terrorist Djamel Beghal's group were not involved in suicide bombings in Europe. But a voluntary death is now indeed the thing they all have in common. There is certainly more information available on the individual trajectories of terrorists operating in Europe than on the jihadists who do not return from conflict zones. But if we trace the paths of those fighting abroad who we can identify, and those of terrorists operating in Europe, we find they are very similar. This has been supported by a survey carried out by students from the School of Journalism at Sciences Po on French citizens who have died in Syria. [1] Similarly, the noteworthy investigation by David Thomson, Les Français jihadistes (The French Jihadists), confirms these patterns. [2] There are more converts blowing themselves up on the front lines than in attacks in Europe, and women tend to go to Syria rather than operate on the continent. But the trajectories are very close, and fall under the same categories. For our part, we start from a French database of about 100 people involved in terrorism in the metropolitan area and/or who left France to participate in a "global" jihad between 1994 and 2016. It includes all participants in major attacks, successful or not, targeting French and Belgian territories. [3]

Profiling Jihadists

4 Our first conclusion is that, over twenty years, such profiles have changed very little. Khaled Kelkal, who carried out the attacks around Lyon in 1995 and was the first terrorist raised in France, resembles the Kouachi brothers, who carried out the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack, in specific ways: they were all initially relatively well-integrated second-generation immigrants who went through a period of petty delinquency, were radicalized in prison, carried out an attack, and died in armed confrontations with the police. The typical terrorist profile is remarkably consistent. There are two major categories: second-generation immigrants (60% of the sample) and converts (25%), with first- (most of them, however, based in France) and, to a lesser extent, third-generation immigrants representing 15% of the total. Almost all are "born again," suddenly discovering religion after a very secular life of drinking, clubbing, and petty delinquency. This occurs either individually or in a small group, but never within the framework of a religious organization. They act in the months following their religious "conversion" or "reconversion." These figures and characteristics are present in all the databases and profile lists currently in circulation.

5 Their targets have changed little over twenty years: they are still public transport and public spaces (the RER, Roubaix police station, the market at Strasbourg, the Bataclan), Jewish sites (though not Israeli ones) like the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse that Mohamed Merah attacked, and "blasphemers"—Charlie Hebdo was threatened long before January 7, 2015. Compared with other countries, particularly Great Britain and the United States, there are fewer individual attacks carried out, randomly or almost randomly, by "lone wolves," although certain acts by individuals with psychiatric problems may fall into this category, like the decapitation of a manager by his employee in Isère in June 2015, whose copycat behavior went as far as suicide.

6 The second constant is the remarkable continuity between all these networks: in each there is at least one actor who knew one or more people connected to a previous network. Let us take two cases. Chérif Kouachi met Djamel Beghal in prison. He himself was a member of the Buttes-Chaumont group (2004), where he met Peter Chérif, who had gone to Yemen to join al-Qaeda. Chérif Kouachi also knew Slimane Khalfaoui, who was involved in the failed bombing of the market in Strasbourg in 2000. Fabien Clain, a convert from Toulouse who claimed the November 13, 2015 attacks from within Syria had met Merah in Toulouse in 2013, and knew Mohamed Dahmani, who was involved in the 2009 Cairo bombing that killed a French woman. Dahmani's younger brother, Ahmed, was an intimate friend of Salah Abdeslam in Brussels and, like him, played a key role in the November 13 attack and the Brussels attack. Similarly, Clain was linked to Sid Ahmed Ghlam, who planned the failed bombing of Villejuif in September 2015. Ghlam's girlfriend Émilie L., a convert, went on to marry Farid Benladghem, whose brother Hakim was killed by the Belgian police in 2013, and who was under suspicion for his links with the perpetrators of the Cairo bombing.

7 Finally, the processes by which radical groups are formed are almost identical. There is sometimes a strong central personality: Christophe Caze in the Roubaix attack, Olivier Corel—an Islamist known as the “white Emir”—, or Djamel Beghal. Other groups are more egalitarian: several members might leave for jihad in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Yemen, or Syria, and so build links between their smaller group and a "central" one like al-Qaeda or ISIS. The group's structure is always the same: a group of friends and brothers who may have known each other since childhood or have met in prison or a training camp. The number of siblings is striking, particularly since, in their absence, the relationship is reproduced when one of the friends marries the sister of another. This autarkic side of the group is important: it reveals its marginality in relation to genuine Muslim society.

8 A crucial point for the study of motivations is that the group is not created by an outside organization. Such an organization does not always exist: neither the Roubaix or Beghal groups were initially affiliated with another organization. They met one only by participating in jihad abroad. Kelkal's case marks a shift: until the RER B attack in July 1995, attacks in France connected to events in the Middle East, which had little to do with Islamic radicalization, were carried out by operatives from abroad. This was the case with the Rue des Rosiers and Tati attacks, where the operative sought to remain underground without being caught, with the intention of either striking or returning home. The aim of the attack was to change the official French position on a specific issue—Lebanon, support for Iraq against Iran, or, as with the RER attack in 1995, support for the Algerian military. Since the Marrakesh attack in 1994 and especially the RER attack in 1995, however, a new phenomenon has emerged, where radical Islamist organizations instrumentalize young French second-generation immigrants. In the Marrakesh case these were radical Moroccan Islamists. In the RER case, they were members of the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). Algerian secret services may have played a role in both cases; the important thing is that the recruits were convinced to serve an Islamic cause. The pattern has not shifted since.

9 The implication is important: radicalization precedes recruitment. It is enough for there to be a "liaison agent" between the local group and the organization the jihadist will later claim to act for. But the group can take action without being directed by an outside organization, as with the Roubaix gang and the "lone wolves" in Great Britain and the United States. Destroying external groups will not end radicalization. Groups like the GIA, al-Qaeda, and ISIS draw from an existing reservoir they have not themselves created. We must instead pay attention to the internal causes of radicalization. Reasons for radicalization are not to be found in the logic of external radical organizations, whether strategic—mounting an attack on Europe—or tactical—recruiting "brothers" to avoid police infiltration, or young female converts who can get past airport security.

10 At the same time, radicals' decision to identify with jihad, and to claim to act for a radical Islamist organization, is not simply opportunistic. The reference to Islam is crucial; it is this that distinguishes radical violence from all the other forms of violence young people commit.

11 Before returning to this key issue of the language of radicalization, we should review other possible causes and motivations.

The Absence of "Objective" Causes

12 Apart from certain common features—radicals are typically second-generation immigrants, often converts who have gone through an episode of delinquency and a very late return to religion—there is little correlation with other socio-economic or psychological indicators that would help us to understand their motivations.

13 There is no typical social and economic profile of a radical. Jihadists are not systematically products of deprived banlieues. The banlieues are of course heavily represented, simply because second-generation immigrants are by definition over-represented among radicals. But the west of Paris produces as many as the east. In absolute terms, Nice has more jihadists than Seine-Saint-Denis, and far more than Marseille. [4] Converts often come from smaller towns, or even the countryside: Maxime Hauchard, for instance, was born in 1992 in Bosc-Roger, in the Eure. This contradicts the idea that non-Muslims convert to Islam out of solidarity with those in the same boat as them. (Although this does happen, of course, and may explain the over-representation of West Indians and people of African origin among converts, like the Granvisir brothers or William Brigitte.) Above all, the profiles of jihadists include a large number of well-integrated, educated young people like Kamel Daoudi, Hakil Chraibi, and Mustapha el-Sanharawi. The Abaaoud family belonged to a reasonably successful group of small traders; Abdeslam's father had an office job.

14 As Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and expert on terrorism, has shown, there is also no particular psychopathological terrorist profile. [5] But it is interesting to note that psychiatrists and psychologists are increasingly involved in questions of radicalization. As with all disciplines, of course, there is an opportunity effect: the deradicalization market opened late in France, after the November 13 attacks. This is not enough to discredit the contribution of psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts. Those who reject explanations in terms of pathology generally emphasize the importance of terrorists' "narcissistic wound." It is often psychoanalysts like Fethi Benslama, Jean-Luc Vannier, and Raymond Cahn, who reason less in terms of pathology than in terms of personality structure, who contribute to such research. [6] The point is not so much to define a terrorist psychopathology—such a thing does not exist—but to emphasize that radicalization plays on a set of affects found in other young people with suicidal behavior who do not engage in Islamic terrorism, like American high school students who commit mass shootings before taking their own lives.

15 Narcissism is the most common thing in the world—starting with terrorism experts. We should look elsewhere for the causes of radicalization.

Avenging a Suffering Muslim Community

16 The simplest thing to do is probably to listen to what the terrorists themselves say. All of them repeat the same themes, summarized in the posthumous statement by Mohammed Sidique Khan, who led the group that carried out the London bombings on July 7, 2005. [7] The first motive is the atrocities committed by the Western countries against the "Muslim people" ("my people all over the world," as Khan put it in his statement). The second is the role of avenging hero that has fallen to the militant ("I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters," "Now you too will taste the reality of this situation"). The third is death ("We love death as you love life") and paradise ("I make dua [pray] to Allah . . . to raise me amongst those whom I love like the prophets, the messengers, the martyrs," and so on).

17 We find this theme in various forms in the words of the Kouachi brothers ("We have avenged the Prophet") and of Amedy Coulibaly, who told his victims—hostages in a kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes—that it was their turn to know fear. Similarly, ISIS’s executioners dress their victims in the uniforms of Guantánamo prisoners, or inflict deaths that supposedly duplicate those of "Muslim" victims, burning and blowing up their prisoners. The theme of a chosen, longed-for death is also recurrent ("We love death as you love life," or, in Merah's version, "I love death as you love life"). Paradise recurs constantly in radicals' final messages to their mothers, where redemption and intercession run together: death erases the radical's sins, and the radical can intercede for his family members, even those who have supposedly forgotten Islam.

Avenging the Ummah

18 The Muslim community being avenged is almost never specified (Khan, for example, uses the phrase "all over the world"). It is dehistoricized and despatialized. Radicals are more likely to talk about "crusaders" than about French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers. Each particular conflict is a metaphor for an ancient struggle that can only end with a final battle. Palestine, Chechnya, China, Bosnia, and Iraq are jumbled together. Photos of atrocities come from every conflict zone. Terrorists never explicitly situate themselves in the colonial era, and reject or ignore all political or religious movements that preceded them. They do not participate in their fathers' struggles: their fathers failed, and they are the only young people who live up to the age of the Prophet. No one returns to pursue jihad in their parents' country, as would be the case if a "colonial genealogy" existed. (The only exception, nothing to do with France, is Somalia.) We find this pattern from the very start: the Marrakesh group in 1994 was made up of Franco-Algerians. For converts, this "virtual" relationship with the Muslim community is clear. Global Islam interests them, not this or that conflict. To my knowledge, none of the jihadists, whether a convert or not, has ever been involved with the pro-Palestinian movement, or with any group fighting Islamophobia, or even with an Islamic NGO. They are not the product of a disillusioned militancy, as was often the case with the leftists of 1968, many of whom were former Communist Party members and militants opposing the Algerian war.

19 Along with this indifference to time is an indifference to space. They are jihadi nomads. They go where there is jihad, but none seeks integration into the country where they fight. The sole exception is Lionel Dumont, who married a young Bosnian woman and stayed there after the war; even then, he remained part of a small Salafist enclave. Their indifference to local culture is also marked by their iconoclasm.

20 This global vision also includes the enemy. There are no innocents: Westerners are responsible for their governments' actions; Muslims who does not revolt are traitors, and there is no reason to spare them during an indiscriminate attack. It is futile to seek a strategic reason for each attack on a specific country. Why hit Spain in 2004 and not Italy, given both were part of the American coalition? There is an opportunity effect here: jihadis strike where they have the people they need.

The Hero

21 The individual's feeling of humiliation and subjugation and their positioning of themselves as a solitary, "avenging" hero is also a constant. Such individualization works even in group attacks—one may particularly esteem, for instance, the hero who blows himself up heading the attack. Obituaries of radicals form a series of hagiographies. The martyr's body avoids the common fate: it becomes beautiful, beautifully scented, or simply disappears in the explosion.

22 This narrative plays on the image of the superhero in movies and video games. The hero doesn't just save the suffering, passive ummah. He has all the power: power of life, power of death, sexual power. Sexual fascination obviously works better for jihad than for terrorism.

23 This great narrative is divided into two registers of language. It makes use, firstly, of references to the first community of believers—and so to martyrdom and the right to keep slaves for sex—the conquest of deserts and cities, and the caliphate, which must embody this global, virtual ummah. But it is also part of a modern aesthetic of heroism and violence. The violence is staged and scripted in elaborate videos. This is not old-fashioned "barbarism": it makes use of a "Sadean" code, of the sort Pier Paolo Pasolini showed in Salò, in 1976. ISIS stands at the crossroads of two imaginaries. One, the caliphate, is religious and classical. The other is present in a particular youth culture which also expresses itself in non-Islamic contexts—in gang life, for instance, as shown by the success of Brian De Palma's 1983 film Scarface among young people. In this violent, macho culture, the jihadist's wife plays the same role as the mob boss's wife. Marseille probably has so few terrorists because you can be a Kalashnikov-toting superhero without having to leave home. For more evidence of the aesthetics of violence, one only needs to watch videos of staged beheadings made by Mexican drug traffickers long before ISIS existed. The recent swell in volunteers for jihad is likely related to this aestheticization of violence, designed to attract likes on Facebook: al-Qaeda never used ISIS’s gory, Sadean style.

Death

24 Strangely, all these defenders of the Islamic state never speak of Sharia, and almost never of the Islamic society ISIS is to build. Paradoxically, the argument that they only wanted "to live in a true Islamic society" is emphasized by those who return and who deny having taken part in violence—as though wanting to fight and wanting to live under Islam were fundamentally incompatible. They wanted to live under an Islamic state, but they didn't want to stay there. This is the paradox: these young people are not utopianists; they are millenarians, and so they are nihilists. The day after will never live up to the night before. None of them participate in the societal day-to-day of the countries where jihad is taking place. They are not doctors or nurses. There is no jihadist Médecins Sans Frontières. But their death washes sin from their lives, which explains why in their eyes the question of religious practice is not fundamental. Nihilism—all of these radicals emphasize the emptiness of life—is part of their mysticism, of joining God. And by presenting death as the desired end of their journey, many emphasize their role as intercessors: thanks to their sacrifice, their parents (especially their mothers) will be saved in spite of their impiety. The son is the master of religious truth, and the one who saves his parents, allowing them to become born again through him. The generational relationship is reversed: the son dies giving birth to his own parents.

25 The act becomes part of a personal rebellion, based on a feeling of humiliation and of belonging to a virtual "community"—a cultural one for second-generation immigrants, a chosen one for converts—and on a grand narrative of a return to Islam's golden age. It is a narrative written according to the codes of a modern aesthetic of violence and played out by organizations born of the concrete crises in the Muslim world, like al-Qaeda and ISIS, which have their own strategies, and whose leaders are never the ones to kill themselves.