Publications

While research on the determinants of conspiracy beliefs has been growing, there is still limited attention given to the broader consequences of conspiracy theories. This study examines the effects of conspiratorial framing on outgroup evaluations in the context of societal crises. Using an experimental design and a large representative sample of the German population, we exposed participants to conspiratorial framings of health, economic, and security crisis scenarios. The findings reveal that exposure to conspiratorial framing of crises leads to significantly more negative attitudes towards outgroups compared to control conditions. The impact is most pronounced in the security crisis treatment condition, particularly in war scenarios. Additionally, our study demonstrates the important role of political ideology, as individuals with left- as well as right-wing ideologies displayed more negative attitudes towards outgroups when exposed to conspiratorial framings of crises. These findings contribute to the literature by providing experimental evidence of the detrimental effects of conspiracy narratives on intergroup attitudes during crises.

A multitude of studies in terrorism research depend on biographical data gathered through the cliometric method. This technique entails reconstructing and aggregating demographic and socio-economic data on terrorism offenders from publicly accessible sources. A notable limitation of this method is the substantial number of missing values. Researchers often employ this data collection strategy as comprehensive official sources are not publicly accessible and are rarely provided to researchers due to privacy concerns, among other factors. In this study, we analyze original data on 53 convicted Islamist terrorism offenders, collected from both publicly available media data and court records. We concentrate on and compare a number of demographic, socio-economic, and biographic variables. The insights derived from these analyses hold important implications for the reliability of biographical research that relies on open-source data.

This study examines the interplay between identification with the country of origin, authoritarian tendencies, and support for Political Islam among Muslims in Germany. Based on a representative survey conducted in 2021 with 1,300 Muslims in Germany, a strong correlation is found between a pronounced identification with the country of origin and support for Political Islam. This connection remains significant even after accounting for religiosity, experiences of discrimination, perceived discrimination, religion-related marginalization, and socio-economic indicators. Notably, authoritarian attitudes moderate this relationship. This means that the support for Political Islam is influenced not only by the strength of ethnic identification but also by authoritarian tendencies. This suggests a convergence of authoritarian nationalism and Political Islam in the German context.

This article explores public support for Jihadi foreign fighters, an area largely unexplored in existing literature, despite its relevance to counterterrorism. The study draws on two key theoretical perspectives: grievance-based explanations that propose support for militancy arises from perceived societal injustices, and religion-based explanations that look at the role of religious factors in fostering support for religious militancy. Using original survey data from 5145 Muslim respondents across seven countries (Cyprus, Germany, Israel, Kenya, Lebanon, Palestine, Turkey), the study empirically tests these perspectives. The findings underscore religious fundamentalism as a potent influencer of support for foreign fighters. By providing large-scale survey data and a comprehensive comparative analysis of dominant theories, this research enhances our understanding of the dynamics that underpin public support for Jihadi foreign fighters.

How does a major external shock that potentially threatens the community and the individual impact religiosity in the context of ongoing secularization? Do individuals in a rich and secularized society such as Germany react to potential community-level (sociotropic) and individual-level (egotropic) threat with heightened religiosity? We estimate multilevel regression models to investigate the impact of sociotropic and egotropic existential security threats associated with the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals’ religiosity. Our data come from a rolling cross-sectional online survey conducted in Germany among 7,500 respondents across 13 waves in 2020. Our findings suggest that a global health pandemic such as COVID-19 increases individuals’ perception of existential and economic threat, which, in turn, leads to an increase in religiosity. However, this relationship is only true for egotropic existential security threat but not for sociotropic threat. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings.

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered polarisation across Europe. While most citizens supported governments’ containment measures, others took to the streets and voiced their dissatisfaction. The article focuses on the mobilisation potential related to this heterogenous protest wave. It examines individuals that show sympathy and are willing to engage in anti-containment demonstrations based on 16 waves of a rolling cross-section survey fielded in Germany in 2020/2021. The results show a considerable and stable mobilisation potential: every fifth respondent sympathises with the protesters, and around 60% of those are ready to participate themselves. Political distrust, far-right orientations and an emerging ‘freedom divide’ structure the potential, as do Covid-19-related economic and health threats. Moreover, the findings indicate a radicalisation process and show how ideology and threat perceptions drive the step from sympathy to willingness to participate, suggesting that ideological polarisation may quickly spill over to the streets given an appropriate supply of protest opportunities.

Is socioeconomic marginalization associated with the radicalization of European foreign fighters? I analyze biographical data on 1019 foreign fighters from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom and compare their level of education and unemployment rate with those of the population most at risk of radicalization, namely the young male Muslim population within the respective country. Overall, the results indicate that compared to the population at the highest risk of radicalization, foreign fighters do not appear to be disproportionately socioeconomically deprived. An analysis of survey data on support for foreign fighters conducted among the Muslim minority in Germany further underlines these findings.

The research for this article is based on original biographical and relational data on 1,019 foreign fighters from France, Germany, and the UK who had traveled to a conflict country due to their Jihadi convictions between the years 2000 and 2016. It investigates where and how they had radicalized. The findings suggest that foreign fighters were primarily recruited through interpersonal or religious organizational networks. Salafist mosques, radical religious associations, and more informal groups dedicated to proselytizing were particularly crucial to the radicalization process. In contrast, contexts such as the Internet or prisons were comparably less relevant to the radicalization process of foreign fighters. The important role of interpersonal and organizational ties was further evidenced by social network analysis, which found that the majority of foreign fighters were linked within a single social network prior to their mobilization. Overall, the findings document the continued rele- vance of religious organizations in the recruitment and mobilization of jihadi foreign fighters.

This study investigates the determinants of negative attitudes toward individuals who leave their religion, i.e., converts and apostates, among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim believers. Drawing on the literature from the study of religion and prejudice, we identify and test the explanatory power of three dimensions of religiosity: religious practice, religious fundamentalism, and religious knowledge, while an alternative hypothesis focuses on the role of education. Our data is derived from a cross-sectional survey fielded among more than 8000 Christian, Jewish, or Muslim respondents in 7 countries. Using ordinary least squares regression analyses, we find that, across the three religious groups, both religious practice and religious fundamentalism are strongly associated with negative feelings toward converts and apostates. Although the effect of religious knowledge is negligible, educational attainment significantly predicts lower levels of unfavorable attitudes. We conclude by discussing some notable differences between the three religious groups and between the countries in which these groups and individuals are located.

Considering intensifying sectarian conflicts in recent years and increasing interreligious violence around the globe, there is a need to further our understanding of negative attitudes toward religious out-groups. To investigate the driving factors behind these negative attitudes among members of the three major Abrahamic religions, I employ original data derived from a survey fielded among 10,046 respondents in eight countries (Cyprus, Germany, Israel, Kenya, Lebanon, Palestine, Turkey, and the USA). A rich body of literature documents the relationship between religious fundamentalism and prejudice. Other scholars have investigated out-group hostility using an intergroup relations perspective, focusing on contact theory, and more recently, on discrimination. While controlling for other relevant factors such as demographic and socioeconomic variables, I investigate the role of religiosity and intergroup relations in explaining unfavorable interreligious attitudes. The results suggest that unfavorable attitudes toward religious out-groups are most strongly associated with religious fundamentalism. This finding is robust across religious groups.

In their attempts to mobilise supporters and justify their actions, violent religious extremists often refer to parts of scripture that legitimize violence against supposed enemies of the faith. Accounts of religious extremism are divided on whether such references to scripture have genuine motivating and mobilising power. We investigate whether references to legitimations of violence in religious scripture can raise support for religious violence by implementing a survey experiment among 8,000 Christian, Muslim and Jewish believers in seven countries across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Africa. We find that priming individuals with isomorphic pro-violence quotes from Bible, Torah or Quran raises attitudinal support for religious violence significantly. Effect sizes are particularly large among those with a fundamentalist conception of their religion. Our results show that religious scripture can be effectively used to mobilise support for violence. The findings thus mark a counterpoint to theoretical arguments that question the causal role of religion and have important implications for de-radicalization policies.