Both the Islamic State and Taliban were formed by soldiers and insurgents left over from military invasions of the Middle East. The former came to prominence thanks to a lot of Bathists in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion - many were officers during Saddam's regime - and the latter by the mujahideen, who fought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and had plenty of military hardware left over to form a powerful army afterwards.

The pressure from polygamy might have contributed to the individual motivations for some people to join those groups, but it was probably far from a significant factor in the geopolitics.

"How the Islamic State recruits young men by kidnapping girls to be their sex slaves"

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/13/islamic-state-re...

Non-paywalled: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/kidnapped-sex-slaves-help-is...

Not only that, lots of the IS people were in Saddam's Mukhabarat (intelligence), where either they had the social prestige to get matches or more crudely speaking, could probably grab women off the street.

Economist had an interesting article on violence related to polygamy. I'd be interested if political extremism is a subcase of a violence or something orthogonal. https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/the-...

Weird that all the anonymous Pakistani names they chose are Hindu or Sikh. A Hindu judge is rare but possible. Polygamy for Hindus was abolished in India in the 1950s but grandfathered in (the word for co-wife, sotan, still exists but I've never heard Muslims use it), but Pakistan just passed a new Hindu Marriage bill and I don't know the status of polygamy under it.

My understanding is that one of the main reasons religion was so important to the success of societies was it’s control over sex.

What worked best for most places was monogamy. With a partner men are more likely to use their energy for their family instead of antisocial tendencies.

This isn’t my theory; I think the technical term is “enforced monogamy” if you want to find data.

There's also this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_boys_(Mormon_fundamenta...

No. That extremism can be explained by oppressive sexual culture in general, not only polygamy (which is not as widespread as people think).

You can’t even date. Many marry young for that reason.

You can't separate the factors like you're trying to do.

And more powerful nations slicing up and occupying your country willy-nilly for centuries?

Not centuries; since Sykes Picot. The sexually repressive culture and extremism predates SP by centuries in fact.

The 20th century was probably the most consequential one in terms of political extremism in the world and there wasn't a lot of polygamy or online dating happening in Europe at least.

Japan and South Korea, two of the most stable and conformist countries politically are notorious for their low rates of sex, particular among young men.

This sounds purely like folk psychology to be honest, people just love somehow attributing sexual motivations to just about everything. To me, this feels like plotting skyscraper construction against sex rates in Asia and then concluding that male architects are channelling their phallic energy into architecture, you can really apply this to everything

Just research the rise of incel subcultures and there is your evidence.