This article uses narrative analysis to examine disillusionment among former ISIS foreign fighters through a dataset of publicly available media interviews. The study draws on these journalistic accounts and conceptualises disillusionment as a process emerging from interconnected factors of deception, unmet expectations, inhumane practices and coercion. A central pattern across the narratives is the dissonance between recruits' initial beliefs and expectations that is often shaped by idealised notions of jihad and moral purpose and the lived realities of life under ISIS rule. Exposure to violence, internal repression and organisational contradictions led many individuals to question the group's legitimacy and reassess their ideological commitments. The analysis further demonstrates how sustained environments of fear and intimidation intensified cognitive dissonance and contributed to disengagement. These findings suggest that disillusionment develops through overlapping moral, emotional and experiential tensions rather than a single causal pathway. The study offers important insights into disengagement processes and has broader implications for understanding other violent extremist movements and informing counter-terrorism interventions.
Identifying violent extremists online before their engagement in physical violence is an ongoing need for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers around the world. Yet the evidence base about their posting footprints or differences in their online behaviors compared to their non-violent counterparts is noticeably scarce. Even less is empirically known about the relationship between their posting behaviors, membership in a violent extremist group, and risk for categorization as violent. This study drew from a unique sample of violent and non-violent right-wing extremists to examine the effect of violent extremist group membership on posting behaviors and risk for violence categorization within a sub-forum of the largest white supremacy web-forum. This study also examined how violence status and violent extremist group membership predicts time to going dormant in the online space. Firth logistic regression modeling was used to examine whether group membership predicted risk for violence categorization. Hazard modeling and survival analysis were then used to examine extremist group membership and violence status as predictors of time to dormancy. Several noteworthy posting patterns were identified in the data that may assist law enforcement and intelligence agencies in identifying credible threats online.
