Here is a Chronicle blog by Evan Goldstein on James Gelvin’s comparison of the al-Qaeda threat to anarchism:

… an influential line of argument [has] emerged that interpret[s] the jihadists as the latest incarnation of the sort of totalitarian menace that previously appeared on the world stage in the guise of German and Italian fascism. Such an analysis was perhaps advanced most cogently by Paul Berman in his 2003 book Terror and Liberalism …
there is another current of thought articulated in a recent address by James L. Gelvin, a historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, in which he compares al Qaeda-type jihadism to anarchism. (Conversely, Gelvin dismisses “Islamo fascism” as “polemic masquerading as analysis.”) According to Gelvin, jihadism and anarchism claim to be defensive in nature, they both target the structures of power they perceive as being responsible for their subjugation, and they both define themselves as ideal “counter-communities.”
Walter Laqueur agrees with Gelvin that the controversial term “Islamo fascism” has little analytical value, but he does not find too much worth in Gelvin’s anarchist comparison either. “Anarchists were not ‘nihilists,’” <a href=”http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2007/12/anarchism_and_qaeda/-116″>Laqueur writes. “They did not negate all values but deeply believed in freedom. Whatever the fundamental beliefs and aims of the jihadists (who are not nihilists either), the struggle for the realm of freedom on earth is not among them.”