Narratives and Counternarratives: Somali-Canadians on Recruitment as Foreign Fighters to al-Shabaab

Recently, the Somali diaspora has found itself at the centre of heightened security concerns surrounding the proliferation of international terrorist networks and their recruitment strategies. These concerns have reached new levels since the absorption of al-Shabaab into al-Qaeda in 2012. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with 118 members of Canada’s largest Somali community, this article draws upon narrative criminology to reverse the ‘why they joined’ question that serves as the predicate for much recent radicalization scholarship, and instead explores, ‘why they would never join’. We encounter Somali-Canadians equipping themselves with sophisticated counternarratives that vitiate the enticements of al-Shabaab. Particularly, notions of ‘coolness’, ‘trickery’ and ‘religious perversion’ mediate participants’ perceptions of al-Shabaab and enable a self-empowering rejection of its recruitment narratives. In particular, we find resonances between the narratives of non-recruits and ‘bogeyman’ narratives that exist commonly in many cultures. The efficacy of these narratives for resilience is three-fold, positioning the recruiters as odious agents, recruits as weak-minded dupes and our participants as knowledgeable storytellers who can forewarn others against recruitment to al-Shabaab