What is "jihadism"

n. The ideological movement within modern Islamic fundamentalism which advocates armed jihad. Islamist guerilla warfare or Islamist terrorism.

Jihadism (also jihadist movement, jihadi movement and variants) is a 21st-century neologism found in the Western languages to describe Islamist militant movements perceived as a military movement "rooted in Islam" and "existentially threatening" to the West. The term "jihadism" was coined in the 2000s and mostly used to cover Islamic insurgency and Islamic terrorism since that time, but it has also been extended to cover both Mujahideen guerilla warfare and Islamic terrorism with an international scope since it arose in the 1980s, since the 1990s substantially represented by the al-Qaeda network.

Contemporary jihadism ultimately has its roots in the late 19th- and early 20th-century ideological developments of Islamic revivalism, developed into Qutbism and related ideologies during the mid 20th century.

The terrorist organizations partaking in the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979 reinforced the rise of jihadism, which has been propagated in various armed conflicts throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Gilles Kepel has diagnosed a specifically Salafi jihadism within the Salafi movement of the 1990s.

Jihadism with an international, Pan-Islamist scope in this sense is also known as global jihadism. Generally the term "jihadism" denotes Sunni Islamist armed struggle. Sectarian tensions led to numerous forms of (Salafist and other Islamist) jihadism in opposition to Shia Islam, to Sufism and to Ahmadiyya.