Islamic State's Online Activity and Responses

Maura Conway, Stuart Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000033571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Islamic State's Online Activity and Responses provides a unique examination of Islamic State's online activity at the peak of its "golden age" between 2014 and 2017 and evaluates some of the principal responses to this phenomenon.

Featuring contributions from experts across a range of disciplines, the volume examines a variety of aspects of IS's online activity, including their strategic objectives, the content and nature of their magazines and videos, and their online targeting of females and depiction of children. It also details and analyses responses to IS's online activity – from content moderation and account suspensions to informal counter-messaging and disrupting terrorist financing – and explores the possible impact of technological developments, such as decentralised and peer-to-peer networks, going forward. Platforms discussed include dedicated jihadi forums, major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and newer services, including Twister.

Islamic State's Online Activity and Responses is essential reading for researchers, students, policymakers, and all those interested in the contemporary challenges posed by online terrorist propaganda and radicalisation. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

Mujahideen Mobilization: Examining the Evolution of the Global Jihadist Movement’s Communicative Action Repertoire

Maxime Bérubé and Benoit Dupont

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Tilly’s notion of “repertoire of action,” this article shows how the evolution of the global jihadist movement’s communicative action repertoire has increased the potential resonance of its discourse. It foresees the construction of the global jihadist movement’s discourse of mobilization as the result of the evolution of its network of actors, the context in which its communications are undertaken, and its adaptation to new communication technologies. Accordingly, it argues that the decentralization of the global jihadist movement has led to a widening of its communicative action repertoire and a diversification of its discourse offering.

Communication and transmission of ideological discourse is of paramount importance to collective mobilization.¹ Such communication is critical to “how entities are formed, how people come to share a political cause and mobilize around it, as well as how political action can turn to violence.”² In recent years, the communication activities of the organizations that mobilized under the global Salafi-jihadist social movement umbrella have been widely studied.³ As other researchers have done, the radical organizations mobilizing around this ideology are herein considered part of a broader movement that can benefit from using social movement theory to better understand its evolution.⁴ Today, this movement is commonly known as the Global Jihadist Movement (GJM),⁵ and is dominated by the social movement organizations (SMOs) Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and their multiple sub-organizations. Although the GJM has been identified as a social movement in numerous studies,⁶ there is no consensus around its identification as such in the literature. Also, while the ideological orientation of this movement tends to be global, it is worth mentioning that each of these SMOs also has different local considerations, and that they do not define themselves in exactly the same ways. In terms of communications, the content of the movement’s diverse discourses has been widely studied,⁷ as have the differences between these discourses,⁸ its use of “new” information and communication technologies (ICT),⁹ and its targeted audiences.¹⁰ Given the importance of new ICT in these works, it would be tempting to fall into technological determinism and seek to explain the evolution of the GJM’s communications only with respect to the advent of the Internet and social media. In fact, none of these works manages to satisfactorily explain the evolution of the GJM’s communications. Moreover, while some refer to the decentralization that has characterized the GJM over the last decades, they do not rely on this decentralization to explain the evolution of the GJM’s communicative apparatus and the diversification of its discourse over time.

Tilly introduced the concept of “collective action repertoire” as “a model where the experience of actors intersects with the authorities’ strategies, creating a limited number of actions more convenient, more attractive, and more frequent than many other means of action that could, in principle, serve the same interests.”¹¹ Despite the significant contributions of this concept to understanding collective mobilization, it mainly pays attention to protest actions when, in fact, social movements can deploy many other actions, such as the construction of persuasive narratives to convince new members and to encourage their participants to actively engage themselves in protest actions. Accordingly, this article focuses on the evolution of the GJM’s communicative apparatus and aims to contribute to the sociology of both terrorism and social movements by introducing the concept of “communicative action repertoire.” Furthermore, it seeks to fill a gap in such literature by asking what the relationship between the decentralization of a social movement, its repertoire of communicative action, and the diversity of its discourse is. It will be shown that, in the case of the GJM, these three components are interrelated. It is worth mentioning here that for the purpose of this study, only oral and written forms of discourse transmission were analyzed, but that communication is not limited to these dimensions and can obviously also include nonverbal communications, such as images or behaviors. Indeed, many argue that collective actions themselves, including acts of violence, are forms of communication.¹²

This article is divided into three sections. The first section describes the theoretical approach behind the concept of communicative action repertoire. The second section supplies a historical look at the evolution of the GJM’s communicative apparatus, with a specific focus on Al Qaeda and Islamic State, in order to better understand the widening of its communicative action repertoire and the diversification of its discourse. This allows for discussion, in the third section, of the implications of such changes in the GJM’s communicative action repertoire and discourse offering.

Communicative action repertoire

It is generally understood in the literature that, as is the case for several other objects of study, social movement theory alone cannot manage to explain collective action. There has been much effort to understand collective mobilization, on the one hand, and SMOs’ action repertoires, on the other, but without considering how these two approaches can enrich each other in order to better understand collective action.¹³ Since resource mobilization theory has its origins in economics, it carries the assumption that a well-structured organization with abundant resources should normally thrive.¹⁴ Nevertheless, studies show that social movements are not always well-structured and have variable levels of resources.¹⁵ Indeed, numerous studies have shown heterogeneity in various SMOs and have suggested that heterogeneity can serve a number of adaptive functions for social movements and facilitate collective actions.¹⁶ However, some also argue that beyond a certain threshold, the heterogeneity of participants’ interests may polarize a movement and undermine collective action,¹⁷ and even resulting in fractions within movements that may be detrimental to them.¹⁸ This uncertainty regarding the effects of heterogeneity within social movements points to a requirement for further digging this aspect of mobilization.

In a similar vein, according to “new social movements” theory, modern social movements are usually more decentralized and diversified.¹⁹ New social movements theory was developed in the 1970s, as researchers sought to describe and analyze those social movements that emerged in the 1960s, which were thought to be different from the workers and trade union movements. More specifically, researchers were interested in the alleged decentralization and diversification of feminist, ecologist, consumerist, nationalist, and student movements.²⁰ However, this paradigm was somewhat neglected by social movement researchers after a number of studies showed that “old” and “new” social movements were more similar than different. Nevertheless, in the case of terrorist movements, some still adopt this position, claiming that a “new terrorism” began to emerge from the early 1990s.²¹ Of course, this “new terrorism” designation is hotly debated in the literature,²² but whether one agrees with it or not, there is no doubt that the GJM has significantly decentralized since the early 2000s.²³ Therefore, it seems appropriate to study this particular case in order to learn more about the effects of the diversification and decentralization of a social movement on its repertoire of action.

Collective action repertoire is a well-known concept in social movement studies. Originally suggested by Tilly,²⁴ it is drawn on here to underline the range of protest actions in which participants can engage in order to accomplish their SMO’s objectives. In this way, one can see that substantial efforts are being made by the participants in social movements to empower their ranks by creating an engaging rhetoric. Specifically, it has been shown that the GJM’s communication apparatus has greatly evolved and is no longer only the work of a specific branch of the organization or its high-ranking officials.²⁵ Members and sympathizers from all levels are now engaged in various communication activities on behalf of the movement. Therefore, this article focuses on the communicative actions undertaken by a social movement, both to mobilize collective action and to communicate their narrative. It is agreed herein that certain collective actions can be spontaneous, but assumed that most have to be planned and that communication is required beforehand, at least between the action’s initiators. It is also important to understand that communication remains central to the development of a social movement. An SMO’s intentions, whether real or purported, must be communicated to its adherents or potential adherents, as well as toward a larger public that can make the desired social change happen. The very essence of a social movement is to defend a cause and to rally an audience to it, so it is considered that all of their communications have the purpose of obtaining a preselected behavior from a specific population. Again, not every communication has this explicitly persuasive component, but it nevertheless always remains part of an overall project of persuasion. Like collective actions, these communications can take various forms and vary from one organization to another. So, in order to allow for a better understanding of the communication practices of social movements, the concept of “communicative action repertoire” is introduced. As the concept of collective action repertoire suggests, focused on are the experience and capacities of the actors involved and the strategies of the SMO’s leaders for purposes of assessing the conditions under which social movements’ communicative actions are constructed and thereby better understanding the relationship between the evolution of a social movement, in this case the GJM, and the development of its communicative action repertoire.

The case of the global jihadist movement

As underlined earlier, there is no consensus around identifying the GJM as a social movement.²⁶ Indeed, significant ongoing structural changes, including uncertainty...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Islamic State’s Online Activity and Responses 2014–2017
• 1 Mujahideen Mobilization: Examining the Evolution of the Global Jihadist Movement’s Communicative Action Repertoire
• 2 Competition and Innovation in a Hostile Environment: How Jabhat Al-Nusra and Islamic State Moved to Twitter in 2013–2014
• 3 A Dialectical Approach to Online Propaganda: Australia’s United Patriots Front, Right-Wing Politics, and Islamic State
• 4 Grading the Quality of ISIS Videos: A Metric for Assessing the Technical Sophistication of Digital Video Propaganda
• 5 Women’s Radicalization to Religious Terrorism: An Examination of ISIS Cases in the United States
• 6 “The Lions of Tomorrow”: A News Value Analysis of Child Images in Jihadi Magazines
• 7 Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and Its Impacts
• 8 Informal Countermessaging: The Potential and Perils of Informal Online Countermessaging
• 9 Social Media and (Counter) Terrorist Finance: A Fund-Raising and Disruption Tool
• 10 A Storm on the Horizon? “Twister” and the Implications of the Blockchain and Peer-to-Peer Social Networks for Online Violent Extremism
• Index