“They fabricated lies against us and described us in the harshest of ways”

Abstract

Abstract Over the past decade, Islamic State (ISIS) has made numerous attempts to propagate their beliefs on a global scale via a range of social media platforms (e.g. Twitter), enabling them to reach an extensive audience within a very short time span; when successful, people enlist as supporters of their ideas and, essentially, become radicalised. ISIS also achieve this through publishing propaganda materials, such as the two online magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah (Heidarysafa et al. 2019). In this paper, our focus lies with the former. Through a transitivity analysis of three issues from Dabiq, this paper explores how the in-group (the believers) and the Other (the non-believers) are represented in the magazine. The transitivity framework is useful here because it exposes the linguistic choices that people make and, in turn, reveals how they perceive their world. To retrieve both quantitative and qualitative findings, the UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell 2016) is employed.