Leaving Home to Join Extremist Violence - Framing of Swedish far-right & Islamist foreign fighters’ reasons to travel abroad to join violent extremist groups

Sammanfattning: Why do some individuals travel to foreign land to join violent extremist groups? This thesis aims to fill the research gap on foreign fighters and their reasons to travel abroad, focusing on one of the countries most affected by this phenomenon; Sweden. Additionally, this thesis intends to counter the fixation on Islamist foreign fighters, which tend to make foreign fighters a product of Muslims. By developing a theoretical and methodological framework with two different levels of analysis, this thesis involves a descriptive in-depth comparative analysis of Swedish far-right and Islamist foreign fighters’ framing of their reasons to travel abroad, set in relation to Swedish newspaper’s framing. According to the findings presented in this study, Swedish Islamist and far-right foreign fighters frame their reasons to travel within the concepts of “outrage and empathy”, “adherence to ideology” and “search for identity and meaning”, but in somewhat distinct manners. The same applies to Swedish newspapers’ framing; Swedish newspapers’ frame Swedish far-right and Islamist foreign fighters within the above concepts, however, in very distinct manners and with a greater degree of resonance with Islamist than with far-right foreign fighters.