Jihadism is a neologism which is used in reference to "militant Islamic movements that are perceived as existentially threatening to the West" and "rooted in political Islam." It has been applied to various insurgent Islamic extremist, militant Islamist, and terrorist individuals and organizations whose ideologies are based on the Islamic notion of jihad. It has also been applied to various Islamic empires in history, such as the Umayyad Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire, who extensively campaigned against non-Muslim nations in the name of jihad.

Contemporary jihadism mostly has its roots in the late 19th- and early 20th-century ideological developments of Islamic revivalism, which further developed into Qutbism and related Islamist ideologies during the 20th and 21st centuries. The Jihadist ideologues envisioned Jihad as a "revolutionary struggle" against the secular international order to unite the Muslim World under the "rule of God". The Islamist volunteer organisations which participated in the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979 to 1989 reinforced the rise of jihadism, which has been propagated during various armed conflicts throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Gilles Kepel has diagnosed a specific Salafist form of jihadism within the Salafi movement of the 1990s. Jihadism with an international, pan-Islamist scope is also known as global jihadism. Studies show that with the rise of ISIL/ISIS/IS/Daesh, some Muslims from Western countries like Albania, Australia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Kosovo, the Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States traveled to join the global jihad in Syria and Iraq.