Islamist Terrorism in Europe

This book recounts the history of jihadi terrorism in Europe from the Air France hijack in 1994 to the raid on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015. It examines a range of terrorist plots throughout the region over a twenty-year period in which individual terrorist cells launched, or sought to launch, a number of deadly attacks. The book aims to explain why these terrorist plots happened when they did and where they did and shed light on what goes on inside European jihadi networks more generally. It seeks to demonstrate how jihadi terrorism in Europe emerged through an intricate interplay between foreign and European factors, between top-down and bottom-up processes of radicalisation, and between social and ideological motivations. The book questions the tendency to view transnational jihadism either as a strategic threat or social movement and discards the notion that explanations for jihadism in Europe can be reduced to a single or just a few factors.