Norwegian version of this page

The Jihadi Document Repository: A new research archive

The Jihadi Document Repository is a step toward rationalizing the collection of, and research on jihadist primary sources. Our goal is to provide controlled access to source material in response to the growing scholarly interest in jihadism and militant Islamism, and in this way support the expansion of this particular field of research.

The Jihadi Document Repository

About the project

The Jihadi Document Repository (JDR) is a joint project by the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) at University of Oslo, and the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (FFI) with the purpose of systematizing and publishing jihadist primary sources, collected over a period of more than fifteen years.

The repository will include relevant document types such as statements, pamphlets, journals, books, interviews, memoirs and so forth. The repository will prioritize certain document types: it seeks to be relatively exhaustive in the domain of jihadist journals, but will not be able to have complete collections of jihadist books and pamphlets.

A majority of the documents are in Arabic, but the repository also contains a number of documents in English, and a small collection of jihadist journals in Urdu. The English-language materials have been organized in a separate folder to be easily accessible to non-Arabic speakers. As for now, the JDR itself does not provide translations of the Arabic or Urdu material, but includes a limited number of translations made by jihadists themselves.

The Jihadi Document repository is for the time being organized in four document categories with the ambition of future expansion:

  • Journals
  • Ideologues and leaders
  • Biographies and memoirs
  • Sources in English

Objectives

Based on previous experiences in gathering jihadist primary sources, the two institutions behind this project respond to the need to create a trusted and easily accessible corpus of jihadist primary sources in order to facilitate knowledge accumulation and to prevent duplication of data collection efforts. By extension, the JDR aims to facilitate a wider range of scholarship based on jihadist primary sources and to explore avenues of automated and quantitative processing of such sources.

By seeking collaboration with researchers from other universities and research institutes, the project will also encourage and facilitate replicability and cooperation across borders. The JDR strives to continuously add new sources in order to keep the repository relatively updated and relevant for students and scholars in the field of jihadism studies. 

Financing and Cooperation

The Jihadi Document repository is established with the financial support from the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo and the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (FFI)

Published Nov. 14, 2016 11:04 AM - Last modified Dec. 18, 2018 10:01 AM