EPISODE · Jun 12, 2026 · 46 MIN
The Fourth Wave of Jihad | Danube Politics
from Danube Institute Podcast · host Danube Institute
The past decade has been a blur. Trucks in Nice. Gay pride parades in Oslo. Westminster Bridge. London Bridge. Manchester Arena. The Bataclan. Wherever people have congregated, the forces of Islamic terror have massed to mow them down. To read Simon Cottee’s new paper for the Danube Institute is to be taken back on a bloody and terrible tour of recent European history. To so many flower-saturated memorials. So many breaking news bars. So many proclamations of never again, and they shall not divide us. Yet on it goes. What have we learned? Not just at the political and civilisational level — but what can we say about the attacks of the post-2015 era, when we view them en masse, as a social phenomenon? Dr Simon Cottee is one of Britain’s leading criminologists. An author, who has delved deep into the question of Islam, and its most ghastly offspring, ISIS. He’s a senior lecturer at the University of Kent, and has been a fellow at the Danube Institute for the past nine months. As part of that fellowship, Dr Cottee performed a complete survey and literature review of Jihadism in the modern era, focusing on a tight ten year stretch, from 2015 to 2025. Raking over hundreds of accounts of bomb plots and mass casualty incidents, to attempt to draw some conclusions. He found many things, but perhaps the biggest headline to come from his paper is that there has been a fourth wave — today’s Jihadists, unlike the local radicalisation of, say, the Dewsbury-born perpetrators of the 7/7 attacks, come as much from overseas. They were born outside of Europe, in the Middle East. 45%, he says of those involved in a fatal terror attack plot, came to the continent as effectively adults. Today, we want to go over his findings of this important paper — as much because, as Simon points out, there seems a reluctance in criminology to categorise people in quite such stark terms. So what is the situation — and is the wave a temporary phenomenon, driven by Angela Merkel’s disastrous 2015 opening of the borders to millions of unvetted migrants? What, if anything, could a fifth wave look like?
What this episode covers
The past decade has been a blur. Trucks in Nice. Gay pride parades in Oslo. Westminster Bridge. London Bridge. Manchester Arena. The Bataclan. Wherever people have congregated, the forces of Islamic terror have massed to mow them down. To read Simon Cottee’s new paper for the Danube Institute is to be taken back on a bloody and terrible tour of recent European history. To so many flower-saturated memorials. So many breaking news bars. So many proclamations of never again, and they shall not divide us. Yet on it goes. What have we learned? Not just at the political and civilisational level — but what can we say about the attacks of the post-2015 era, when we view them en masse, as a social phenomenon? Dr Simon Cottee is one of Britain’s leading criminologists. An author, who has delved deep into the question of Islam, and its most ghastly offspring, ISIS. He’s a senior lecturer at the University of Kent, and has been a fellow at the Danube Institute for the past nine months. As part of that fellowship, Dr Cottee performed a complete survey and literature review of Jihadism in the modern era, focusing on a tight ten year stretch, from 2015 to 2025. Raking over hundreds of accounts of bomb plots and mass casualty incidents, to attempt to draw some conclusions. He found many things, but perhaps the biggest headline to come from his paper is that there has been a fourth wave — today’s Jihadists, unlike the local radicalisation of, say, the Dewsbury-born perpetrators of the 7/7 attacks, come as much from overseas. They were born outside of Europe, in the Middle East. 45%, he says of those involved in a fatal terror attack plot, came to the continent as effectively adults. Today, we want to go over his findings of this important paper — as much because, as Simon points out, there seems a reluctance in criminology to categorise people in quite such stark terms. So what is the situation — and is the wave a temporary phenomenon, driven by Angela Merkel’s disastrous 2015 opening of the borders to millions of unvetted migrants? What, if anything, could a fifth wave look like?
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The Fourth Wave of Jihad | Danube Politics
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