Simon Cottee

Academic and Author

What Motivates Terrorists?

One of the most frequently asked questions about terrorism is also the most intractable. Why? Why do they do it? Why do people join terrorist groups and participate in acts of terrorism?
There are as many answers to this question as there are terrorist groups, and everyone from clerics to caustic cab drivers seems to have a confident opinion on the subject, as though the interior world of terrorists can be easily mined and mapped. But this confidence is often misplaced, given how little scholars actually know about terrorism and the people who are involved in it.

The Zoolander Theory of Terrorism

Who knew that Zoolander would eclipse The Siege as the most prescient Hollywood movie about jihadist terrorism?
The Siege, scripted by Lawrence Wright—who went on to author a groundbreaking study of al-Qaeda called The Looming Tower—is a pre-9/11 drama about a wave of jihadist atrocities in New York and the human-rights catastrophe thereby entrained, including the introduction of martial law and the internment of Arabs across the city. Zoolander, released just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, is by contrast a comedy about an imbecilic male model who is brainwashed by an outlandish criminal organization to carry out an act of international terrorism.

What exactly is the allure of Islamic State?

“She used to watch ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ and stuff like that, so there was nothing that indicated that she was radicalized in any way — not at home.” So said Sahima Begum in her testimony before the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee in London this month. She was speaking about her sister Shamima, 15, who together with Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase, 15, absconded from England last month to Turkey, eventually crossing the border into Syria.

Taking off the veil

As young Islamists hog headlines by revelling in slaughter, a procession of other young Muslims, often women, are risking all — even their lives — to abandon the faith, writes Simon Cottee

Terrorism With a Human Face

It’s all in the face, apparently. Just check out that terrifying mug shot of Mohammad Atta, the so-called “ringleader” of the 19 hijackers who staged the 9/11 attacks. His face, wrote the novelist Martin Amis in a short story about Atta, was “gangrenous” and “almost comically malevolent.” Hateful, too:

Why It’s So Hard to Stop ISIS Propaganda

“We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, purportedly wrote in a 2005 letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who led al-Qaeda in Iraq at the time. The previous year, Zarqawi’s network, originally known as Tawhid and Jihad, had publicly released more than 10 beheading videos, including a video believed to show Zarqawi himself beheading the American businessman Nicholas Berg. This was bad PR, Zawahiri cautioned his hotheaded field commander, and risked alienating Muslims.

I Escaped an Arranged Marriage

A few months ago, Amina left home. She was due to marry her father's friend: a man from Yemen nearly three times her age. The thought of it terrified her. She had expressed deep reservations from the start, but her father – a well-known sheikh in Canada with a large international following – was adamant that she was to be married and had initiated the sponsorship process to bring her prospective husband over from the Middle East.

ISIS and the Logic of Shock

On Tuesday, ISIS released another snuff movie: the ritualized burning to death of a captured Jordanian pilot. It is arguably the most shocking ISIS video to date. But then every major video ISIS puts out is arguably the most shocking ISIS video to date. The film of the mass beheading of some 20 Syrians last year, which ended with the display of the severed head of an American aid worker, was, at the time it was released, arguably the most shocking ISIS video to date. And so was the video, released last month, featuring a child as chief executioner in the slaughter of two men confessing at gunpoint to be Russian spies.

Why Ex-Muslims Pig Out

To your averagely profane, carnivorous unbeliever, it is a thing of beauty. An object of unvarnished pleasure. A pretext, even, for a national day of celebration. Whereas to your averagely devout Muslim, carnivorous or otherwise, it is an abomination. A vomit-inducing object of disgust. I’m talking about the bacon sandwich.

Pages

Watching Murder book cover

Watching Murder: ISIS, Death Videos and Radicalization

'Watching Murder shines a light onto the dark world of jihadi murder videos and the people who watch and share them on the internet.

Images and videos of murder, torture and other cruelties are everywhere on the internet. Why do some people seek out and watch this material, how are they affected by it and do they have a right to watch any of it in the first place? In this ground-breaking book, terrorism scholar Simon Cottee visits the murky fringes of the internet in search of answers. Focusing on ISIS, he shows how the group transformed the urban myth of the snuff movie into a grim reality watched by tens of thousands of people across the globe. On shock-sites, he finds a contingent of ISIS fans who, while hating the group, love to watch its most monstrous depredations in high definition.'

"Watching Murder fills a conspicuous gap in the literature by providing an authoritative dissection of one of the more prominent—and chilling—features of contemporary terrorism: so-called jihadi snuff videos. Cottee brings his usual perspicacity, verve, and clarity to explain how ISIS harnessed social media to manipulate global opinion and communicate a carefully constructed image of the group designed simultaneously to repel and appeal to its multiple target audiences." --Professor Bruce Hoffman, Georgetown University and author of Inside Terrorism

"In this book, Simon Cottee interrogates himself, and his readers, about why some people find terrorist atrocity films both repulsive and irresistible. These films often contain important information for counterterrorism, but not all of us are willing to risk PTSD in order to decode them. As we have come to expect of Cottee, he is perpetually, provocatively sceptical of any and all received wisdom. Lushly written and researched." --Professor Jessica Stern, Boston University and author of Terror in the Name of God

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Black Flags of the Caribbean book cover

Black Flags of the Caribbean

'The Caribbean does not immediately come to mind when we think about ISIS and yet, in 2017, Trinidad and Tobago ranked first place in the list of western countries with the highest rates of foreign-fighter radicalization, with over 240 nationals travelling to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS caliphate. Simon Cottee investigates how ISIS came to gain such an unlikely, yet significant foothold in Trinidad.'

‘Easily the most original book on the ISIS phenomenon to date. A riveting detective story with deep insights on human behavior, this is social science at its best." --Thomas Hegghammer, Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and the author of The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad (2020)

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Isis and the pornography of violence book cover

ISIS and the Pornography of Violence

'ISIS and the Pornography of Violence' is a collection of iconoclastic essays on ISIS, spanning the four-year period from its ascendancy in late 2014 to its demise in early 2018. From a trenchant critique of the infantilisation of jihadists to a probing examination of the parallels between gonzo porn and ISIS beheading videos, the pieces collected in this volume challenge conventional ways of thinking about ISIS and the roots of its appeal. Simon Cottee's core argument is that Western ISIS recruits, far from being brainwashed or 'vulnerable' dupes, actively responded to the group's promise of redemptive violence and self-sacrifice to a total cause.

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The Apostates

The Apostates is the first major study of apostasy from Islam in the western secular context. Drawing on life-history interviews with ex-Muslims from the UK and Canada, Simon Cottee explores how and with what consequences Muslims leave Islam and become irreligious.

‘Free people should be able to abandon their religion without being punished. Simon Cottee brings us the stories of British and Canadian ex-Muslims who live in the shadow of stigma and with the threat of ostracism. Wider society has ignored them, and the most disgraceful elements of the Left have denounced them, but here they can speak for themselves. Books are too often described as “important” or “original” when they are neither. The Apostates is both.’ — Nick Cohen, columnist and author of You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

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Christopher Hitchens and His Critics

Christopher Hitchens—political journalist, cultural critic, public intellectual and self-described contrarian—is one of the most controversial and prolific writers of his generation. Whatever readers might think about Hitchens, he remains an intellectual force to be reckoned with. And there is no better place to encounter his current thinking than in this provocative volume.

“The controversial pundit dishes out and takes punishment in this anthology of rancorous essays by him and the leftist comrades he abandoned to embrace the invasion of Iraq. . . .There'’s red meat aplenty for pro- and anti-Hitchens readers.” - Publishers Weekly

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