The Portuguese foreign fighters phenomenon: a preliminary assessment

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the phenomenon of a group of Portuguese citizens and Portuguese-descendants who went to fight alongside the Islamic State (IS) organisation and other extremist groups in Syria and Iraq. The article provides a new contribution to radicalisation by using a new dataset and an understudied case study: Portugal. It hosts a small Muslim community, which has not found itself under the spotlight of being a major concern, as regards the terrorist threat. Is it possible to find common underlying motivations driving young men and women to volunteer for jihad? Do young Muslims face different constraints that explain their involvement in militant activity, particularly being more vulnerable to factors such as socioeconomic marginalisation? Does socialisation in peer-to-peer ideological networks, and small-group recruitment within pre-existing radical milieus play a decisive role? By identifying biographical factors that stand out in two radicalisation theories – social network analysis, and the relative deprivation hypothesis –, it is possible to elicit what factors hold when applied specifically to the Portuguese case. The data provide support to socioeconomic explanations and group-level factors as the main mechanisms that lead converts to involvement in extremism and terrorism.

KEYWORDS:

• Portugal
• foreign fighters
• jihadism
• social network theory
• Islamic State

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Most of the information data used in this article was obtained from the research conducted by journalists Hugo Franco, Sara Moleiro, and Nuno T. Pinto, published in two books, as well as from several news articles they wrote. It was collected primarily from Pinto’s (2015), and Franco and Moleiro’s (2015b) books, and also from some of their articles. As they themselves state, much of the data disclosed in their works on Portuguese fighters were unofficially confirmed to them by intelligence and security sources. As regards data provided in those books, it was collected through interviews with relatives, friends, police, and intelligence sources, as well as a thorough gleaning of data on social media outlets used by the jihadists, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Hi5, Ask.fm, Tumblr, and YouTube. Those journalists were able to interview some of the Portuguese recruits and, in some cases, to engage in regular talks with them on social networks and on Skype (notably with Fábio, Mikael Batista, Mickaël dos Santos, and Ângela). The timeframe for the data collection process was between 2014 and early 2015. I also used a diverse array of Internet and newspapers news and articles. As regards international sources, see: The Soufan Group (2015, p. 9), Dodwell, Milton, and Rassler (2016, p. 9), Boutin et al. (2016, p. 47), Kern (2014b).

2. The number is not exact, as authorities do not provide updated information.

3. Five of which have reportedly died: Boutin et al. (2016, p. 47).

4. The noticeable exceptions are: The Soufan Group (2015, p. 9), Dodwell et al. (2016, p. 9), Boutin et al. (2016, p. 47), Kern (2014b).

5. Sageman differentiates between radicalisation as the acquisition of extremist opinions, and the actual ‘turn to violence.’ The first step in this process is radicalisation, by joining a political protest community; the second is mobilisation to violent action (2014b, p. 575; see also Dalgaard-Nielsen, 2010, p. 798).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Center in Political Science – CICP [Grant Number UID/CPO/00758/2013].