Provisional PhD Thesis Title: “Shades of anti-Colonialism: British Muslim Violence from Street Vigilantism to Mujaheddin in the Bosnian Civil War, 1975-1995”
PhD Completion Date: 2025
PhD Supervisor & Co-Supervisor: Cyrus Schayegh and Timothy Wilson (University of St Andrews, Scotland)
My PhD research project studies the historical evolution of British Muslim radicalism after the Second World War and engages with the growing body of literature on decolonisation and anti-colonialism. In the second half of the XX century, anti-colonialism has been an inspiring intellectual paradigm for numerous radical political actors over Europe, British Muslims included. Yet, under this overarching anti-colonial principle, actual radical practices manifested in different forms and colours. Black Power-inspired organisations, Islamic associations, and different Islamist groups alternatively led the struggle and claimed to be exclusive bearers of the anti-colonial banner. Puzzlingly, the specific transition mechanism from one shape of radicalism to another remains mysterious. The purpose of my study asks a very simple question: How did British Muslim anti-colonial practices change after the Second World War?
From Black Power-inspired anti-fascist street vigilantes affiliated with the Asian Youth Movement to the icy Bosnian battlefields of the early 1990s, where the first British Muslim mujaheddin stumbled into early Salafi-Jihadist intellectuals, my work sets to journey through British Muslims’ multiple political militances. Through the use of recently opened archival sources in Western European languages, Arabic and Bosnian-Croat-Serbian and interviews with ex-British Muslim activists and returned mujaheddin, my research hopes to use the microcosm of British Muslim radical underground to find the global ruptures and continuities of anti-colonialism after the collapse of one of its natural counterparts, as was the British Empire.
Michele holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Padova, Italy and an Mlitt in Terrorism and Political Violence from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Before joining the Graduate Institute, he was intern as Security Analyst at Amaplast-Confindustria in Milan and had a few volunteer experiences in the Balkans. He recently began to contribute with the Italian newspaper “L’Espresso”.