Images as Ideology in Terrorist-Related Communications

Abstract

This chapter explores image-centric practices in contemporary media by exploring how violent extremist groups use images and text to attempt to legitimize their views, incite violence, and influence potential recruits and supporters in online propaganda materials, and how the images from these materials are re-used and recontextualized across media platforms. The aim is to understand the prominent role of images in the communication strategies employed by terrorist groups and in the patterns of recontextualization in the spread of these images in online media, with a view to developing effective means for understanding and thus countering the effects of online violent extremist messages. The sources of data for extremist propaganda are the English-language online magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah, produced by Islamic State (ISIS). Results show that, through its propaganda material, ISIS orchestrates combinations of images and text to construct a worldview which is internally cohesive, based on a narrow, fundamentalist interpretation of selected Islamic scripture, that rejects and is violently opposed to any other worldview. While ISIS present their ideology explicitly in materials they produce, images which encapsulate this ideology are distributed widely on the Internet and recontextualized in different patterns in a variety of mainstream and social media.