The Global Challenge of Jihadist Terrorism: A Quality-of-Life Model

What makes some Muslims in identifiable regions of the world accept Jihadism and, more particularly, Jihadist terrorism as a solution to domestic social, economic, and political problems? We attempt to answer this question using a sample of 32,604 Muslims from 26 countries surveyed in 2011–2012 by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. We hypothesized that many Muslims believe that Jihadist terrorism is an acceptable solution to national, regional, and global social problems such as political corruption, recurrent crime, inter-generational poverty, diversity-related social conflict, widespread joblessness and under-employment that pervade many Islamic nations. This belief is determined by attributing blame for recurrent national problems to Western powers and to their overly powerful cultural and political influence in Islamic societies but, especially those that until recently, were colonies of major European powers. National problems blamed on Western influence, in turn, result in a high sense of national ill-being, which in turn is influenced by low levels of subjective well-being (or subjective ill-being). We also hypothesized that certain effects associated with political militancy, including the willingness to engage in acts of terrorism, are moderated by a sense of economic ill-being and by a fervent sense of Muslim religiosity among the strongest believers in each society. The study results reported in this paper are mostly supportive of these hypotheses. The public policy implications of the findings reported herein are discussed throughout the paper as well.