Neoliberalism and Neo-Jihadism

Propaganda and Finance in Al Qaeda and Islamic State
Neoliberalism and Neo-jihadism investigates the political economy of Al Qaeda and Islamic State. Its examination reveals that while these organisations propagandise on the basis of widespread anti-capitalist sentiments, at the same time they exploit and contribute to the same mechanisms of neoliberal, late modern capitalist finance they condemn.

This ground-breaking book examines the political-economic characteristics of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century ‘neo-jihadism’. Drawing on Bourdieusian and neo-Marxist ideas, it investigates how the neo-jihadist organisations Al Qaeda and Islamic State engage with the capitalist paradigm of neoliberalism in their anti-capitalist propaganda and quasi-capitalist financial practices.

Richards reveals interactions between neoliberalism and neo-jihadism characterised by surface-level contradiction, and structural connections that are both dialectical and mutually reinforcing. Neoliberalism here constitutes an underlying ‘status quo’, while neo-jihadism, as an evolving form of political organisation, is perpetuated as part of this situation.

Representing unique and exclusive examples of the (r)evolutionary phenomenon of neo-jihadism, Al Qaeda and Islamic State have reconstituted the dominant political-economic paradigm of neoliberalism they mobilised in response to.