Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb: A “Glocal” Organization

There are many conditions that push local terrorists groups toward internationalization. Similarly, many local conditions and roots seem to continue to influence groups. The current literature on terrorist groups has sometimes neglected to analyze this double phenomenon of internationalization and local roots. With a concrete assessment of the recent violence in Algeria, this article demonstrates that GSPC/Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb is a good example of this dual nature, mixing local and global (e.g., “glocal” 1 1. Glocalization as a term, although originating in the 1980s from within Japanese business practices, was popularized in the English-speaking world by the British sociologist Roland Robertson (Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage, 1992) in the 1990s, and later developed further by Zygmunt Bauman, “On Glocalization: or Globalization for some, Localization for some Others,” Thesis Eleven, 54(1) (1998), 37–49. ), traditional and imported practices, and high- and low-tech technologies.