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 sur-rounding 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 com-munity, 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.