Pragmatics and Society - Volume 13, Issue 3, 2022

This paper aims to study the process of violent radicalization in El Puche, a marginal neighborhood of Spain with a high percentage of disenfranchised Muslims. Particularly, we explore whether this neighborhood exhibits the factors proposed by the 3N model of radicalization: needs, networks, and narratives. We present two studies in which we analyze these factors. In the first study, we compare needs and networks between Muslims (N = 47) and Christians (N = 45). In the second study, we analyze the interrelation of these factors in a sample of Muslims (N = 111). We found that people’s association with radical networks mediates the relationship between the quest for significance and radical narratives. We conclude that need, network, and narrative are interconnected, and illustrate some of the dynamics that foster social exclusion and radicalization, leading to supporting violence in this type of urban environments.

The strategy of jihadist groups is based on objectives that are sometimes global. Specifically, many of these groups argue that Muslims, wherever they live, should fight for the establishment of an Islamic state or, at least, for such a state to be possible elsewhere. Therefore, taking advantage of the emergence of the Internet, they initiated an equally universal narrative strategy, with the production of a great deal of content, especially audiovisual texts. The effects of this material are known and, unfortunately, may be behind the terrorist actions of various individuals in many countries. Hence the concern of academics lies with their analyses and with the development of methodologies that can successfully deal with large amounts of multimodal information. The present research, therefore, aims to apply a quantitative procedure to the analysis of jihadist propaganda. Specifically, the authors have analysed 2,211 videos belonging to different terrorist groups, by applying an image classification algorithm. The results show that this type of approach has realistic possibilities of providing relevant information about this corpus – when realized, they may help to create automated analytical tools capable of dealing with the enormous amount of information that can be disseminated on-line.

This chapter presents an investigation into the evidence of fixed language use within jihadist magazines and the extent to which these fixed patterns reflect specific power relations within the text community. The research presents the hypothesis that the writers of articles in jihadist magazines have become primed to employ the words and sets of words through their repeat usage (cf. Hoey 2005, 2017). Thus, lexical and grammatical associations and constructions are analysed to determine the extent to which language use is unique in our corpus. Evidence is presented in the unique way power relationships are linguistically expressed; it is argued here that this reflects the ways in which the writers are primed for their motives or aims of recruitment. Here, a number of words, which are fairly common in news discourse and are in the sematic field of power relations, have been identified as keywords in jihadist magazines. These show the collocation and colligation divergence where they are compared with occurrences in the COCA magazines sub-corpus covering the same time period.

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.

Since the proclamation of the Caliphate in 2014, an unprecedented number of women have fled to Syria to join the Islamic State (IS). This fact, a matter of national security for many countries, has spotlighted the two major official propaganda magazines of the organisation, Dabiq and Rumiyah, since both publications are considered potential recruitment tools. This paper studies the sections addressed to women in the aforementioned magazines to find out: (a) the roles of women within IS as depicted by the two official propaganda channels and (b) the legitimation strategies used by the organisation to justify their claims. To reach these aims, I will study the data considering the legitimation models proposed by van Leeuwen (2008) and Reyes (2011). The analysis will unveil the ideal type of woman any Muslim female joining the armed group should aspire to become.

The ideological discourse of Jihadist groups like Al Qaeda or Islamic State is largely built on the use of persuasive techniques which act as instruments for radicalisation and recruitment, and more generally, “convince the audience of the veracity of the doctrine presented” (Adam 2017: 5). This article explores the use of metaphor as an important rhetorical and ideological dimension to jihadist texts. Current findings suggest that religious writings often make use of rich conceptual metaphors to convey distinctive ideological perspectives (Prentice, Rayson and Taylor 2012), for instance, the well-known journey conceptual metaphor, with the image schemata of a path, leading towards a better life, reward in an afterlife, moral choice, hope, and a closeness to God (Jäkel 2002). Specifically, the research adopts a Critical Metaphor Analysis framework (Charteris-Black 2004), which combines Corpus Linguistics with Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. The data for this study is taken from a collection of jihadist online magazines. The corpus has been compared against the Qur’an in order to ascertain whether jihadist propaganda writers are inspired by conventional religious tropes as a way of giving authority to their doctrines. The results show that religiously inspired concepts do indeed help the writers to anchor their message to a deeply seated and authoritative set of ideologies. At the same time, semantic and pragmatic differences in the use of these metaphors suggest an ability to manipulate pre-existing conceptualisations in order to fulfil the communicative needs of the writers, i.e. to embody the principles of jihadism. The findings presented here focus on the following domains: religion as a journey; light as good; heat as fighting; and spirituality as nature.

Neojihadism taps successfully into the Internet’s influence to disseminate its oppression narrative of Muslims vs. non-believers (Al Raffie 2012). Whilst this type of radicalisation has received attention from psychoanalysis (Kobrin 2010), jihadist discourse is in need of more exhaustive examination. By detecting recruiters’ key persuasive strategies, we may understand what can move people to violent action. In this paper, we employ SFL Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005; Bednarek 2008, 2009; Benítez-Castro and Hidalgo-Tenorio 2019), to undertake a detailed analysis of the interplay between emotion and opinion in a pair of exemplars from two jihadist magazines: The Taliban’s Azan and Al-Qaeda’s Inspire. The close inspection of these texts reveals two distinct persuasive strategies: One revolving around a markedly negative pathos of victimhood and deep distress caused by injustice, past and present; and the other conveying pride and confidence at the many virtues behind the jihadi path.

Extremist online networks reportedly tend to use Twitter and other Social Networking Sites (SNS) in order to issue propaganda and recruitment statements. Traditional machine learning models may encounter problems when used in such a context, due to the peculiarities of microblogging sites and the manner in which these networks interact (both between themselves and with other networks). Moreover, state-of-the-art approaches have focused on non-transparent techniques that cannot be audited; so, despite the fact that they are top performing techniques, it is impossible to check if the models are actually fair. In this paper, we present a semi-supervised methodology that uses our Discriminatory Expressions algorithm for feature selection to detect expressions that are biased towards extremist content (Francisco and Castro 2020). With the help of human experts, the relevant expressions are filtered and used to retrieve further extremist content in order to iteratively provide a set of relevant and accurate expressions. These discriminatory expressions have been proved to produce less complex models that are easier to comprehend, and thus improve model transparency. In the following, we present close to 70 expressions that were discovered by using this method alongside the validation test of the algorithm in several different contexts.