Decentralized Muslim Brotherhood

The organizational fragmentation of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood has not eliminated its ability to maintain ideological and organizational influence throughout Europe. Given this remarkable resilience, it seems reckless to dismiss measures to monitor and control the Brotherhood as disproportionate or alarmist. The European Parliament therefore adopted a resolution on October 8, 2026, calling for an EU-wide strategy to counter Islamist networks. However, in establishing such a strategy, security forces and investigative authorities face the challenge of developing approaches and strategies that respond to the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational adaptation.

An important element of such an EU-wide strategy is a better understanding of the Brotherhood’s organizational and ideological resilience. This resilience can be conceptualized and defined using the concept of “decentralized cohesion.” This refers to an ideological and functional cohesion that can be maintained without centralized organizational control. Four mutually reinforcing mechanisms sustain this form of cohesion: discursive convergence, overlapping networks, strategic differentiation, and competitive interdependence.

These four mechanisms enable formally independent actors associated with the Muslim Brotherhood to adapt to different national contexts while simultaneously drawing on shared ideological reference points, infrastructures, and sources of legitimacy. Individuals active across national borders play just as important a role in this Islamist ecosystem as a precise division of labor and functional differentiation.

A network-based approach is therefore well-suited for analyzing and countering this ecosystem. Paying closer attention to transnational connections and the division of tasks can help policymakers and security agencies better understand the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence and cooperation across institutional and national borders. Since key individuals and institutions within the Muslim Brotherhood operate across national borders, authorities should strengthen the exchange of relevant information with European partners. To this end, exchange mechanisms would need to be established at the European level through which personnel, expertise, funding, and institutional experience could circulate among security agencies, experts, and the academic community. Such a pan-European mechanism can help distinguish more precisely between legitimate Muslim organizations and actors from the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist network.