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The Islamic State (ISIS) early became infamous for its broadcasts of extreme violence. However, within months, the group’s initially dominant images of combat and executions had been subsumed into a broader propaganda platform more focused on state-building and community engagement. Drawing on a close reading of Abu Bakr Naji’s Management of Savagery, this article conceptualises three dominant themes within ISIS’ recruitment propaganda—violence, state and caliphate—and analyses their development and presentation over time. Employing a recruitment model adapted from Prochaska and DiClemente’s theory of behavioural change, it finds that ISIS developed a multidimensional propaganda platform, undergoing both broad thematic and structural evolution, which democratised the appeal of its jihad to cohorts who would otherwise be uninspired by extremist violence. ‘Technological coding’—the selective publication of thematic content by broadcast format—is proposed as a means by which ISIS was able to sustain binary violent and non-violent identities, and its function in the group’s propaganda machine is explored in depth. In the wake of ISIS’ territorial defeat, understanding the logic and effectiveness of its recruitment methodology is essential in preventing its resurgence or the rise of a newer organisation seeking to take its place.

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt den Zusammenhang zwischen den digitalen Erinnerungskulturen von ‚9/11‘ und der Mediengeschichte des World Wide Web im Zeitraum von 2001 bis 2016. Die darin angelegte Problemstellung behandelt das rekursive Verhältnis von Medialität und Historizität und lässt sich als Kombination von zwei Fragestellungen fassen: Welchen Einfluss hat der digitale Medienwandel – insbesondere in Form des World Wide Web – auf die Verarbeitung des Medienereignisses ‚9/11‘ in verschiedenen Erinnerungskulturen? Und welche Rolle spielen im Gegenzug das Medienereignis und die Erinnerungskultur von ‚9/11‘ für die Beobachtbarkeit des Web als historischer Medienkonstellation und für die Bedingungen der Internet- und Webhistoriographie? Bislang gibt es zu beiden Fragen lediglich punktuelle kulturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen, die zwar einzelne Anwendungen oder bestimmte Zeitpunkte thematisieren, jedoch die strukturelle Koevolution von Medialität und Historizität nur unzureichend berücksichtigen. Die vorliegende Arbeit ist die erste medienhistoriographische Studie, die nicht nur einzelne webbasierte Erscheinungsformen des Erinnerungsortes ‚9/11‘ betrachtet, sondern ihre heterogenen Entwicklungslinien und transmedialen Verflechtungen genealogisch wie systematisch untersucht. Im Umkehrschluss besteht das Novum der Arbeit in der Ausarbeitung und Anwendung einer reflexiven Perspektive, die den Status von ‚9/11‘ als Element von webbasierten Gedächtnisformen und als Erkenntnisobjekt der Webgeschichte diskutiert.

Although video releases have been central to the Islamic State’s efforts to represent itself to its audiences, an extensive quantitative and qualitative study of these sources over a longer period of time is still lacking. This paper therefore provides an overview and analysis of the entire corpus of official videos released by the Islamic State between 1 July 2015 and 30 June 2018. It particularly focuses on how the Islamic State’s decline in Iraq and Syria during this period is reflected in its video output and how the group has responded to its setbacks. The paper demonstrates a strong correlation between the group’s mounting troubles and its video production: the numbers of videos decreased dramatically and their content reflects the Islamic State’s (re)transformation from a territory-based ‘state’ to an insurgent group relying on guerrilla tactics and terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, this paper argues that the Islamic State’s multi-faceted response to its setbacks might ensure the groups’ appeal to its target audience in the years to come.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Violence usually spread online, as it has spread in the past. With the increasing use of social media, the violence attributed to online hate speech has increased worldwide resulting rise in number of attacks on immigrants and other minorities. Analysis of such short text posts (e.g. tweets etc.) is valuable for identification of abusive language and hate speech. In this paper, we present Deep Context-Aware Embedding for the detection of Hate speech and abusive language on twitter. To improve the classification performance, we have enhanced the quality of the tweets by considering polsemy, syntax, semantic, OOV words as well as sentiment knowledge and concatenated to form input vector. We have used BiLSTM with attention modeling to identify tweet with hate speech. Experimental results showed significant improvement in the classification of tweets.

The National Academy of Engineering called the grid the world’s largest integrated machine and a central part of the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century—electrification of modern society. Reliable electricity service is essential to health, welfare, national security, communication, and commerce. Because of its scale, geographic reach, and complexity, however, the grid also poses many security challenges in maintaining reliable operation. Furthermore, more than 90 percent of the U.S. power grid is privately owned and regulated by the states, making it challenging for the federal government to address potential vulnerabilities to its operation, and perhaps especially its vulnerability to terrorist attack. This report examines those vulnerabilities.