Working Paper 5: Online and Offline (De)radicalisation in the Balkans

It is an ethnically mixed municipality, with Macedonians constituting the majority of the population, predominating in the city of Kumanovo and in the majority of the 46 villages that belong to the municipality. [...] For Kosovars, the wounds of the brutal conflict between Kosovo and Serbia during the 1990s were fresh and many could relate to the plight of the civilians in Syria under the tyrannical regime of Bashar al-Assad. [...] This is in part due to the legacy of the OFA and its power-sharing model in which the size of the ethnicity was the only criterion for access to some rights (employment, use of the mother tongue in the public sphere and education, etc.) and in which inter-ethnic relations were exploited as a tool to score political points (ethnically based politics).10 Statements by political and religious leaders. [...] In the case of NMK, the number of Albanian foreign fighters in the Middle East, some of them from the Tetovo and Kumanovo regions, provides a perfect example of how the online presence of radical groups and imams has led to the radicalisation of individuals from local communities and the perpetuation of violence offline. [...] Their narrative echoes the calls for the protection of Islam and Muslims from their internal and external enemies and portrays the foreign fighters as the “soldiers and lions of Allah”.15 Many of these posts consist of videos that cover the massacres of Muslims in Syria and elsewhere (Palestine, Somalia, China and Chechnya, etc.) and photographs of soldiers fighting the enemy.