Phase 1 – Launch Conference & Book
The CoJiT initiative aims, from an independent perspective, to determine why and how jihadist terrorism happens in the UK and elsewhere and to make a meaningful contribution towards effective and appropriate responses.
Phase 1 of the project has seen the creation of a baseline understanding of the current jihadist terrorism problem that distinguishes:
- those aspects that are well-understood and for which there is reliable empirical evidence;
- those aspects that are assumed to exist but for which the empirical evidence is contradictory or unreliable; and
- those aspects of the problem that are generally assumed or asserted but for which there is little reliable empirical evidence of any sort.
CoJiT has addressed the problem in a series of 27 synthesis studies brought together in a single volume – Jihadist Terror: New Threats, New Responses (published in 2019 by IB Tauris) – that has created a new synthesised baseline of agreed understanding around these components of jihadist terrorism as it currently affects UK society. Each of these synthesis papers outlines the headlines and trend lines in their given topic and the Abstract for each paper can be found here.
CoJiT then hosted a Conference in London on 12 September 2018 that presented its research synthesis conclusions to an invited audience of specialists, government analysts, policy makers and police and civil service leads and discussed ways to operationalise the new ideas that had emerged. Simultaneously, it launched the ‘national conversation’ that had been called for by the then Prime Minister as one of the more thoughtful responses to the multiple jihadist terrorist attacks that had scarred the UK the previous year. This marked the start of CoJiT’s second phase.