Jaideep Saikia
(jdpsaikia@gmail.com)
For three decades the dominant grammar of terrorism studies has been political. Terrorism, in the formulation Bruce Hoffman made canonical in Inside Terrorism, is violence, or the threat of it, pursued in the service of a political aim. The definition separates terrorism from crime and madness. Its limitation becomes plain when the object of study is the contemporary Islamist terrorist, and above all the ISIS-inspired actor. Today, a political lens effectively explains the organisation, but it does not adequately account for the individual. This article argues that the missing variable is the “psychological sanctuary”: an interior space in which a deviant mind shelters its convictions from contradiction.
Hoffman’s contribution is important, and it should be stated fairly. He did not ignore religion. His treatment of religious terrorism recognises that sacred imperatives alter the moral calculus. He was among the first to insist that the religious and the secular terrorist differ in kind.
Hoffman interviewed me for Stratagem, a Norwegian online journal dedicated to military strategy, on 9 August 2022. When Hoffman asked me about this concept, I told him plainly that a framework that treats politics as the cause of Islamist terrorism mistakes the alibi for the origin. I explained that the decisive variable is the “psychological sanctuary”: the protected interior space in which the deviant mind shelters its convictions from contradiction, consequence and conscience. The political programme, I said, is the furniture of that room, not its foundation. That conversation is the clearest statement I have made of why the political paradigm, however rigorous, cannot account for the persistence of ISIS-inspired violence after its territorial defeat.
I clearly told him that “the world must begin to comprehend that there are extra-religious reasons for the violence being perpetrated around the world. The fact that every radical killer—till date—has been a Muslim should not, in any way, prevent systematic research and unearthing of the motivation for a person getting radicalised.
See: https://www.stratagem.no/bruce-hoffman-interviews-jaideep/
But the difficulty lies elsewhere. Even in that treatment, religion enters as a modifier of political violence. The political aim remains the explanatory anchor. This is the first flaw. A definition built on aims presupposes that aims are the causal origin of violence. For a considerable portion of Islamist terrorism, the causal sequence runs the other way. The aim is an explanation provided after the psychological commitment has already been established.
The second flaw follows from the first. If aims are causal, then changing the political conditions should change the violence. The record of the last two decades does not support this assertion. The caliphate announced in 2014 was an eschatological claim beyond the reach of negotiation, not a bargaining position. Foreign recruits who left stable lives in Europe and Asia for Raqqa were not responding to a political offer. A framework that attributes the cause to politics must either struggle to identify the political factors involved or acknowledge that an underlying issue is influencing the situation. The term “psychological sanctuary” refers to that prior concept.
A territorial sanctuary is a place the state cannot reach. The psychological sanctuary is its cognitive analogue: a region of the mind that counter-evidence, social disapproval and moral dissonance cannot enter. The idea has three components.
The first is deviance, understood not as pathology but as a systematic departure from the normative constraints that ordinarily bind the self: the prohibition on killing the innocent, the weight of empathy, the demand for proportion. The deviant mind has not lost the capacity to reason. It has re-engineered the premises from which it reasons.
The second is insulation. Once those premises are re-engineered, the mind builds a protective perimeter around them. Contradiction is reclassified as enemy propaganda, doubt as weakness or temptation, and the suffering of victims as divine justice or collateral necessity. Ordinary cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable state that pushes a person to revise. Inside the sanctuary, dissonance is neutralised before it can do its work.
The third is reward. The sanctuary is not merely a fortress but a refuge in the fuller sense: it offers certainty in which the self is important.
The proposition that follows is not that every Islamist terrorist has entered such a sanctuary. It is that the sanctuary is the necessary condition for sustained, conscience-free violence in the name of religion.
The political paradigm tends to treat religion as content, a set of beliefs one could in principle replace with another set. The sanctuary thesis treats religion as architecture. A totalising religious ideology supplies exactly what the sanctuary requires: an unfalsifiable authority, a binary moral order, a promise of transcendent reward, and a vocabulary that converts murder into an obligation. Salafist doctrine (I never use the word ‘Jihad’!) does this with unusual efficiency, because it offers a ready-made interpretive system in which every disconfirming fact is already accounted for.
This doctrine points out a feature that political explanation finds awkward: the speed and completeness of some radicalisations. A grievance takes years to cultivate and is open to redress. A sanctuary, once the right ideology is available, can be entered quickly and, crucially, alone. The lone actor, the online convert and the returnee from a failed caliphate are not anomalies for a theory of sanctuary; they are its central cases.
ISIS is instructive because its genius lay not in political strategy, where it was conspicuously poor, but in the manufacture of psychological sanctuaries at scale. It offered the recruit a complete interior world: an enemy so thoroughly dehumanised that empathy had nowhere to land. The territorial caliphate was a physical sanctuary in the old sense. The more durable product was the psychological one, which survived the losses in Mosul and Baghouz, explaining why defeat on the ground did not end the phenomenon. A political framework predicts that the collapse of the proto-state should have drained the movement of motive. That it did not is the empirical embarrassment for the framework and the natural confirmation for the sanctuary thesis. The geography was dispensable; the interior refuge was not.
None of this requires abandoning the insight that terrorism has political consequences or that organisations act strategically. It requires reversing the order of explanation.
If the sanctuary is at the heart of the problem, policy must change accordingly. Counter-narratives aimed at addressing the political claim miss the target because the claim itself does not define the person’s beliefs. Territorial victory is necessary but insufficient. The campaign that matters is conducted inside the mind, and it is won by making the sanctuary uninhabitable and, just as important, by providing a better place to live.
The political paradigm gave the field rigour and a shared vocabulary, and its debt to Hoffman is real. But it gravely mistook the visible structure of terrorism for its cause. In the universe of discourse of Islamist terror, where religion, the deviant mind and the ISIS experience converge, the explanatory work is done by the interior refuge in which conscience is suspended and conviction is made immune. The psychological sanctuary is not an embellishment on the political account. It is what the political account has been unable to see.