Narratives

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has made great use of the Internet and online social media sites to spread its message and encourage others, particularly young people, to support the organization, to travel to the Middle East to engage in combat—fighting side-by-side with other jihadists, or to join the group by playing ...

In the domain of computer science, the last years have witnessed the improvement of social network analysis at scale. One of the most challenging aspects of social network analysis is community detection; analysts use a variety of tools to visualise the spontaneous group structure emerging from interactions and friendship relations in multi-million-user networks. This visualisation, ...

The Jihadist phenomenon has a privileged space in Web 2.0 where contents can be created, networks can be global and all exchanges of information have significance. The emergent Jihadist organizations have been profiting from these digital communication features to enlarge, diversify and connect with their audience. On the one side, the virtual framing of Jihad ...

Which news sources do supporters of populist islamophobic groups and their opponents rely on, and how are these sources related to each other? We explore these questions by studying the websites referenced in discussions surrounding Pegida, a right-wing populist movement based in Germany that is opposed to what its supporters regard as islamization, cultural marginalization ...

A framework for understanding Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)’s apocalyptic theology as an internal strategy to “coercively radicalize” its captive subjects is presented, by comparison to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which shares key stages of captive indoctrination with ISIS. A violent experience of “entry,” religious rules learned in an “assimilation” process, and ...

The phenomenon of foreign fighters has become a central issue to the ongoing conflict in Syria. This article explores how members of the public answer the question ‘Why do British citizens join the conflict in Syria’ on social media sites and in response to online news articles. Building upon research on everyday narratives of security ...

This paper summarizes discussions held on 24 May 2016 in Riga, Latvia, which focused on exploring the Kremlin and DAESH information activities in order to improve our understanding of the nature of these communications and their effect on Western societies. The questions discussed were:   How are the communications and messages of DAESH and the ...

Within the last 10 years, the internet has become the principal platform for the dissemination and mediation of the culture and ideology of jihadism. The exponential growth of jihadist fora, with their increasingly ‘high-end’ production values, sophisticated critiques of prevailing narratives and ostensive attempts at impartiality, do not occur in a vacuum. To a great ...

This case study explores the convergence of white extremist political ideology with mainstream political ideology on the micro-blogging platform Twitter – a phenomenon termed “inter-ideological mingling”. Exploring the spread of white extremism in the digital environment can provide insight into the growth of hate groups in the physical environment. A sample of 4800 tweets was ...

Applying cutting-edge psychiatric theories to an analysis of online Taliban literature in four languages, Neil Krishan Aggarwal constructs a game-changing narrative of the organization’s broad appeal and worldview. Aggarwal focuses on the Taliban’s creation of culture, evoking religion in Arabic and English writings, nationalism in Dari sources, and regionalism in Urdu texts. The group also ...