Jihadism

Jihadism is a neologism for modern, armed militant Islamic movements that seek to establish states based on Islamic principles. In a narrower sense, it refers to the belief that armed confrontation is an efficient and theologically legitimate method of socio-political change towards an Islamic system of governance. The term "jihadism" has been applied to various Islamic extremist or Islamist individuals and organizations with militant ideologies based on the classical Islamic notion of lesser jihad.

Jihadism has its roots in the late 19th- and early 20th-century ideological developments of Islamic revivalism, which further developed into Qutbism and Salafi jihadism related ideologies during the 20th and 21st centuries. Jihadist ideologues envision jihad as a "revolutionary struggle" against the international order to unite the Muslim world under Islamic law.

The Islamist organizations that participated in the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979 to 1989 reinforced the rise of jihadism, which has since propagated during various armed conflicts. Jihadism rose in prominence after the 1990s; by one estimate, 5 percent of civil wars involved jihadist groups in 1990, but this grew to more than 40 percent by 2014. With the rise of the Islamic State (IS) militant group in 2014—which a large contingent of Jihadist groups have opposed—large numbers of foreign Muslim volunteers came from abroad to join the militant cause in Syria and Iraq.

French political scientist and professor Gilles Kepel also identified a specific Salafist version of jihadism in the 1990s. Jihadism with an international, pan-Islamist scope is also known as global jihadism. The term has also been invoked to retroactively characterise the military campaigns of historic Islamic empires, and the later Fula jihads in West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries.