Online Library

Just three years ago, the Islamic State’s Central Africa Province was the poster child for the Islamic State’s efforts to maintain a constant and lingering threat across the globe. That year, the group conducted a series of regional terrorist attacks across Central and East Africa, and expanded inside the Democratic Republic of the Congo. More importantly, it produced a plethora of propaganda releases, making it one of the most active Islamic State’s affiliates on the continent. Today, this has largely changed. While still a serious and deadly threat inside Congo and beyond, its propaganda output is a shell of its former self. This decline is, in part, thanks to the current joint Ugandan-Congolese operations against it.

Since the declaration of the War on Terror in 2001, militant groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have used the internet to disseminate their message and persuade people to commit violence. While many books have studied their operational strategies and battlefield tactics, Media Persuasion in the Islamic State is the first to analyze the culture and psychology of militant persuasion.

Drawing upon decades of research in cultural psychiatry, cultural psychology, and psychiatric anthropology, Neil Krishan Aggarwal investigates how the Islamic State has convinced people to engage in violence since its founding in 2003. Through analysis of hundreds of articles, speeches, videos, songs, and bureaucratic documents in English and Arabic, the book traces how the jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi created a new culture and psychology, one that would pit Sunni Muslims against all others after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Aggarwal tracks how Osama bin Laden and al-Zarqawi disagreed over the goal of militancy in jihad before reaching a détente in 2004 and how al-Qaeda in Iraq merged with five other groups to diffuse its militant cultural identity in 2006 before taking advantage of the Syrian civil war to emerge as the Islamic State. Aggarwal offers a definitive analysis of how culture is created, debated, and disseminated within militant organizations like the Islamic State. Psychiatrists, psychologists, and area-studies experts will find a comprehensive, systematic method for analyzing culture and psychology so they can partner with political scientists, policy makers, and counterterrorism experts in crafting counter-messaging strategies against militants.

Analysis of the construction of the cyberterrorist threat, with the core argument that US media outlets have been significant contributors not just to the dissemination, but to the actual discursive construction of the contemporary cyberterrorist threat and, further, that it is their emphasis on the (imagined) fatal connectivity between virtual networks and physical infrastructures that makes the concept of cyberterror so powerful.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

As a social media platform, Instagram has a strong influence on youth culture, identity, and perceptions of the world, with the application serving not only for youth to follow accounts that are aspirational but also for entertainment and identity building through memes. Meme accounts that are explicitly conservative and that espouse white supremacist, hateful ideology and subsequently, identity, are incredibly prevalent. Media serve as powerful institutions for the socialization of youth, and content on the platform reveals that memes are serving as building blocks of ideological meaning. This study conducted a discourse analysis of the memes and content circulated by the alt-right affiliate movement the ‘Proud Boys,’ which is being sold to young men as a fraternity-like organization to celebrate ‘Western ideals’. Proud Boys operate on an ideology that consists of both symbolic and physical violence, and the popularity of these groups is growing. Using Bourdieu’s work on language as a framework, this article is an exploration to their recruitment and world-building practices on Instagram using memes and will be necessary to understand the movement, and to gain further insight into how memes are being used as propaganda.

The far right is increasingly relying on visual and less extreme online communication, for instance by using memes, to strategically mainstream their ideology. The use of humor in particular renders their communication more relatable to a mainstream audience. However, little is known about the actual impacts of the different content characteristics they employ to become more appealing, in particular on less moderated platforms that function as safe online spaces for extremist ideology and contents. To fill this gap, we conducted a manual quantitative content analysis of 1,200 memes distributed within German-language far-right Telegram channels in 2020 and 2021, concentrating on humor and several content-related factors to analyze their impact on meme reach. The results demonstrate that memes with extreme far-right narratives and memes with humor received fewer views than others, but that memes with both far-right narratives and humor had a significantly increased reach. The findings highlight the mainstreaming potential of humor, particularly when used to mask extreme content that would otherwise be less appealing.