The awareness that the threat of terrorism is no longer linked only to the Middle East, but has home-grown nature and arisen from young people living on European soil, alarmed the public and subsequently provoked increased interest in radicalisation research. 9/11 or the European terrorist attacks in London or Madrid have led to the increasing media attention of the phenomenon of radicalisation occurring among young European Muslims. At the beginning of the new millennium, the threat stemming from terrorism embodied one of the most urgent security challenges, whether for politicians or scholars. The academic and political interest in research into factors that increase the risk of radicalisation to violent extremism has ended up in many efforts to grasp and properly define radicalisation, or to outline the expected pathways of radicalisation (Veldhuis, 2009: 1). In my thesis, I build on these efforts of prominent experts and I examine the effect of the factors contributing to violent radicalisation like social networks, dissatisfaction with current reality, moral outrage, family and individual characteristics including criminal backgrounds. I look at the impact of these factors in case studies of three Western European countries - Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom. Except discussing specific...

While transnational rebellion and rebel recruitment have received much attention in previous literature, the combination of the two, transnational rebel recruitment, has been relatively understudied. This study aims to cover this research gap by further developing Jeremy Weinstein’s theory on resource endowments to test their effect on transnational rebel recruitment. It seeks to answer the research question: “How do resource endowments impact transnational rebel recruitment?”. A distinction will be made between domestic and transnational rebel groups to test the theoretical argument. It will be argued that rebel groups can have a variation in their economic and social endowments, which both have a domestic an transnational variant. The main hypothesis reads: transnational rebel groups that have much transnational resource endowments are more likely to recruit transnationally. This study will employ a structured focused comparison on strategically picked cases using Mill’s method of difference. The selected cases that will be compared are the transnational rebel group NPFL in Liberia (1989-1995) and the domestic rebel group NRA in Uganda (1981-1986). This study finds support for the theory and the main hypothesis.