This article offers a bottom-up understanding of the media strategy employed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as it relates to the production and dissemination of its hostage execution videos. Through an empirical analysis of sixty-two videos of executions produced by ISIL in the year following its establishment as the “Islamic ...

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)’s flagship English-language magazine, Dabiq, is a puzzle. The magazine is not, despite appearances, primarily designed for direct recruiting efforts or inciting violence against the West. In fact, the primary audiences of Dabiq are English-speaking second generation Muslims or converts, Western policymakers, and a third group of current ...

The internet has profoundly changed the way we communicate, including how jihadist groups seek to reach Western audiences with their propaganda strategies. Cases of believed online-radicalization call for a re-evaluation of radicalization processes, previously thought to depend on face-to-face interactions. Based on the Hoffman-Sageman debate on whether top-down or bottom-up processes drive terrorism, this essay ...

The academic community studying terrorism has changed dramatically in the past decade. From a research area which was investigated by a small number of political scientists and sociologists, employing mainly descriptive and qualitative studies that resulted in limited theoretical progress as noted by Schmid and Jongman (1988) as well as Crenshaw (2000), it has in ...

The internet permeates all aspects of modern life and violent extremism is no exception. Although the level of importance is sometimes disputed, few would deny the role that online communication has in driving people towards violent extremist groups. While there are various perspectives on the exact nature of this process, it is increasingly agreed upon ...

In this article, the authors theorize the communicative logic of ISIS online death videos—from the burning and shooting of individual hostages to mass battleground executions. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s reflections on contemporary violence, they demonstrate how ISIS’ digital spectacles of the annihilated body confront Western viewers with horror— or rather with different “regimes of horrorism” ...

Some scholars and others are sceptical of a significant role for the Internet in processes of violent radicalisation. There is increasing concern on the part of other scholars, and increasingly also policymakers and publics, that easy availability of violent extremist content online may have violent radicalising effects. This article identifies a number of core questions ...

Seit Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts besteht innerhalb der sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung der Konsens, dass die technologischen Möglichkeiten des Internets von vitaler Bedeutung für den islamistischen Terrorismus sind (Corman 2011; Cornish& Lindley-French&Yorke 2011; Fink&Barclay 2013). Verschiedene Studien bewerten die Existenz des Internets gar als Voraussetzung dafür, dass eine terroristische Organisation wie Al Qaida bereits länger als 20 ...

Public interest and policy debates surrounding the role of the Internet in terrorist activities is increasing. Criminology has said very little on the matter. By using a unique data set of 223 convicted United Kingdom–based terrorists, this article focuses on how they used the Internet in the commission of their crimes. As most samples of ...

Dounia Mahlouly puts to task online radicalisation by understanding it as a goal to create transnational audiences, using a comparative approach to discuss the cases of europe, the mena region and Southeast asia. ...