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Malia Politzer is the executive editor of piqd.com, and an award-winning long-form journalist based out of Spain. She specializes in reporting on migration, international development, human rights issues and investigative reporting.
Originally from California, she's lived in China, Spain, Mexico and India, and reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Her primary beats relate to immigration, economics and international development. She has published articles in Huffington Post Highline, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, Mint, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Reason Magazine, and the Phoenix New Times. She is also a regular contributor to Devex.
Her Huffington Post Highline series, "The 21st Century Gold Rush" won awards from the National Association of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club, and American Society of Newspaper Editors. She's also won multiple awards for feature writing in India and the United States.
Her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Institute For Current World Affairs, and the Global Migration Grant.
Degrees include a BA from Hampshire College and MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where was a Stabile Fellow at the Center for Investigative Journalism.
Who Are The New Jihadists? A Nihilistic Youth Death Cult, Says Oliver Roy
In The Guardian long read Who are the New Jihadists, author Oliver Roy endeavors a deep-dive profile of the young men and women who blow up other people (and themselves) in pursuit of jihad. Like so many before him, he asks who they are, and why they do what they do.
His answers, however, vary somewhat from the predominant (and often reductionist) narrative. According to Roy, Europe's so-called "homegrown" terrorists are not, in fact, religious fundamentalists whole zeal turns to violence, but violent nihilists who find justification for their actions in Islam.
Roy argues that the young men and women who blow themselves up in the name of Islam have more in common with the young perpetrators of mass school shootings in the US than with observant Muslims. In effect, they are not Muslim extremists, but members of a death cult that justifies their actions through Islam.
Their "attitude toward death is inextricably linked to the fact that contemporary jihadism, at least in the west – as well as in the Maghreb and in Turkey – is a youth movement that is not only constructed independently of parental religion and culture, but is also rooted in wider youth culture. This aspect of modern-day jihadism is fundamental."
In many cases, he observes that their radicalization took place before turning to religion, rather than the reverse – an important distinction.
"There is a temptation to see in Islam a radical ideology that mobilises throngs of people in the Muslim world, just as Nazism was able to mobilise large sections of the German population. But the reality is that ISIS's pretension to establish a global caliphate is a delusion – that is why it draws in violent youngsters who have delusions of grandeur."
