From Total Islam to the Islamic State: Radicalization Leading to Violence Dynamics as a Subject of Reciprocal Affordance Opportunities
Keywords:
Total Islam, affordance opportunity, mobilization, radicalization leading to violenceAbstract
This article aims to clarify the role of the Islamic State’s (a.k.a. ISIS) online activities on radicalization. To that effect, all empirical endeavors on the underpinning phenomenon in Vox-Pol’s library were systematically reviewed and assessed. This exhaustive review suggests that Radicalization Leading to Violence (RLV) offers a nuanced conceptualization of the complex, emergent, and non-linear and dynamic phenomenon. Findings of the included studies were recorded, visualized, and clustered, allowing the discussion of possible scenarios, and thus, the inference of a utilitarian model of RLV dynamics based on the conceptual map of the literature. On the basis of connectivity and affordance opportunities (online and offline [beyond the digital realm]), Total Islam (i.e., a totalizing identity marker rather than an indicator of religiosity) is posited to be a critical element of the inferred model. ISIS is argued to use both affordance opportunities in a way that capitalizes on the manifestations of Total Islam to mobilize those embracing this form identity across different RLV trajectories. To that end, the paper is concluded by discussing its implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research.
References
Alexander, A. (2016). Cruel Intentions: Female Jihadists in America. The George Washington Program on Extremism.
Ali, M. (2015). ISIS and propaganda: How ISIS exploits women. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Amarasingam, A, and JM Berger. 2017. "With the destruction of the caliphate, the Islamic State has lost far more than territory." The Washington Post. October 31. Accessed April 2018.
Amghar, S., Boubekeur, A., & Emerson, M. (2007). European Islam: Challenges for Public Policy and Society. Brussels: Centre for European Policy Studies.
Awan, I. (2017). Cyber-extremism: Isis and the power of social media. Society, 54(2), 138-149.
Badawy, A., & Ferrara, E. (2017). The Rise of Jihadist Propaganda on Social Networks.
Berger, J. M. (2015). The metronome of apocalyptic time: Social media as carrier wave for millenarian contagion. Perspectives on Terrorism, 9(4), 61-71.
Berger, J. M. (2016). Nazis vs. ISIS on Twitter. A Comparative Study of White Nationalist and ISIS Online Social Media Networks. GW Program on Extremism.
Berger, J. M., & Morgan, J. (2015). The ISIS Twitter Census: Defining and describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter. The Brookings Project on US Relations with the Islamic World, 3(20), 4-1.
Bjørgo, T. (2004). Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality and Ways Forward. New York: Routledge.
Bloom, M., Tiflati, H., & Horgan, J. (2017). Navigating ISIS’s Preferred Platform: Telegram. Terrorism and Political Violence, 1-13.
Bouhana, N., & Wikstrom, P.-O. (2011). Al Qai'da-Influenced Radicalisation: A Rapid Evidence Assessment Guided by Situational Action Theory. (RDS Occasional Paper 97). London: Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate.
Brooking, E., & Singer, P. W. (2016, November). War Goes Viral: How social media is being weaponized across the world. Retrieved from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/war-goes-viral/501125/
Byman, D. 2017. Beyond Iraq and Syria: ISIS’ ability to conduct attacks abroad. Testimony, Washington, D.C.: Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/beyond-iraq-and-syria-isis-ability-to-conduct-attacks-abroad/.
Campana, A., & Lapointe, L. (2012). The Structural ‘Root’ Causes of Non-Suicide Terrorism: A Systematic Scoping Review. Terrorism and Political Violence, 24(1), 79-104.
Canbegi, H. I. (2016). Google Based Reactions To ISIS’s Attacks: A Statistical Analysis. Global Policy and Strategy / Center for Regional Studies.
Chatfield, A. T., Reddick, C. G., & Brajawidagda, U. (2015). Tweeting propaganda, radicalization and recruitment: Islamic state supporters multi-sided twitter networks. 16th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (pp. 239-249). ACM.
Chertoff, M. (2007). Testimony on Radicalization before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 110th Congress (2007) (written testimony of Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Retrieved from http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/testimony/271.pdf
Comey, J. B. (2015, October 8). Statement before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Retrieved from Federal Bureau of Investigation: https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/threats-to-the-homeland
Conseil du statut de la femme & Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence. (2016). Women and Violent Radicalization. Canada, Québec: Conseil du statut de la femme.
Davis, P. K., & Cragin, K. (2009). Social Science for Counterterrorism: Putting the Pieces Together. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation.
Dechesne, M., & Meines, M. (2012). What's new about radicalization in the Netherlands? The rise of individualized radicalization and its policy challenge. Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, 5(1), 55-59.
Ducol, B., Bouchard, M., Davies, G., Ouellet, M., & Neudecker, C. (2016). Assessment of the state of knowledge: Connections between research on the social psychology of the Internet and violent extremism. Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security, and Society .
Erlanger, S. (2017, June 3). After London Attack, Prime Minister Says, ‘Enough Is Enough. Retrieved from The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/world/europe/uk-london-attacks.html
European Commission. 2014. European Commission. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/111495_en.html.
Farwell, J. P. (2014). The media strategy of ISIS. Survival, 56(6), 49-55.
Fernandez, A. M. (2015). Here to stay and growing: Combating ISIS propaganda networks. The Brookings Project on US Relations with the Islamic World Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.
Ferrara, E. (2017). Contagion dynamics of extremist propaganda in social networks.
Ghajar-Khosravi, S., Kwantes, P., Derbentseva, N., & Huey, L. (2016). Quantifying salient concepts discussed in social media content: An analysis of tweets posted by ISIS fangirls. Journal of Terrorism Research, 7(2), 79-90.
Gill, P., Corner, E., Conway, M., Thornton, A., Bloom, M., & Horgan, J. (2017). Terrorist Use of the Internet by the Numbers. Criminology & Public Policy, 16(1), 99-117.
Gilsinan, K. 2015. "Is ISIS’s Social-Media Power Exaggerated?" The Atlantic. February 23. Accessed April 2018.
Gómez, Á., López-Rodríguez, L., Sheikh, H., Ginges, J., Wilson, L., Waziri, H., Vázquez, A., Davis, R., & Atran, S. (2017). The devoted actor’s will to fight and the spiritual dimension of human conflict. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(9), 673.
Hafez, M., & Mullins, C. (2015). The Radicalization Puzzle: A Theoretical Synthesis of Empirical Approaches to Homegrown Extremism. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, vol. 38, issue 11, p., 38(11), 958-975.
Heydemann, S. (2014). Countering violent extremism as a field of practice. United States Institute of Peace. Retrieved from https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/Insights_Spring_2014.pdf
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. (2016, July 11). S. Rept. 114-295 - Combat Terrorist Use of Social Media Act of 2016. Retrieved from congress.gov: https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/114th-congress/senate-report/295/1
Homeland Security Committee Homeland Security Committee. (2016). Final report of the task force on combating terrorist and foreign fighter travel.
Horgan, J. (2008). From Profiles to Pathways and Roots to Routes: Perspectives from Psychology on Radicalization into Terrorism. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 618(1), 80-94.
Hörnqvist, M., & Flyghed, J. (2012). Exclusion or culture? The rise and the ambiguity of the radicalisation debate. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 5(3), 319-334.
Huey, L., & Witmer, E. (2016). # IS_Fangirl: exploring a new role for women in terrorism. Journal of Terrorism Research, 7(1), 1-10.
Hughes, S., & Meleagrou-Hitchens, A. (2017). The Threat to the United States from the Islamic State’s Virtual Entrepreneurs. CTC Sentinel, 10(3), 1-8.
Ingram, H. (2016). A Linkage-Based Approach to Combating Militant Islamist Propaganda: A Two-Tiered Framework for Practitioners. The Hague, Netherlands: The International Center for Counter-Terrorism–The Hague.
Ingram, H. (2017). The Strategic Logic of the “Linkage-Based” Approach to Combating Militant Islamist Propaganda: Conceptual and Empirical Foundations. The Hague, Netherlands: The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague.
Kepel, G. (2000). Jihad : expansion et déclin de l’islamisme [Jihad: expansion and decline of Islamism]. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
Khalil, J. (2014). Radical Beliefs and Violent Actions Are Not Synonymous: How to Place the Key Disjuncture Between Attitudes and Behaviors at the Heart of Our Research into Political Violence. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 37(2), 198-211.
Klausen, J. (2015). Tweeting the Jihad: Social Media Networks of Western Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 38(1), 1-22.
Kundnani, A. (2012). Radicalization: The Journey of a Concept. Race and Class, 54(2), 3–25.
Medium. (2017, May 27). G7 statement on the fight against terrorism and violent extremism. Retrieved from Medium: https://medium.com/g7inus/g7-statement-on-the-fight-against-terrorism-and-violent-extremism-de53d1da862b
Meleagrou-Hitchens, A., & Kaderbhai, N. (2017). Perspectives on Online Radicalisation: A Literature Review 2006-2016. International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), King’s College London. Retrieved from http://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ResearchPerspectivesonOnlineRadicalisation.pdf
Munk, T. B. (2017). 100,000 false positives for every real terrorist: Why anti-terror algorithms don't work. First Monday. Journal on the Internet, 22(9)
Neumann, P. R. (2003). The trouble with radicalization. International Affairs, 98(4), 873-893.
Pressman, D. E. (2016). The Complex Dynamic Causality of Violent Extremism: Applications of the VERA-2 Risk Assessment Method to CVE Initiatives. In A. Masys, Disaster Forensics. Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications. (pp. 249-269). Springer, Cham.
Rahimi, S., & Graumans, R. (2015). Reconsidering the Relationship Between Integration and Radicalization. Journal for Deradicalization, 5, 28-62.
Reynolds, S. C. (2016). German foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq. Monterey, California: Naval Postgraduate School.
Rowe, M., & Saif, H. (2016). Mining Pro-ISIS Radicalisation Signals from Social Media Users. Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (pp. 329-338). Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Saif, H., Fernandez, M., Rowe, M., & Alani, H. (2016). On the Role of Semantics for Detecting pro-ISIS Stances on Social Media. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 1690.
Shane, S., & Hubbard, B. (2014, August 30). ISIS displaying a deft command of varied media. Retrieved from New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/world/middleeast/isis-displaying-a-deft-command-of-varied-media.html?_r=0
Smith, E. R., Meszaros, C., Love, R., Jones, E., Nashed, S., Modzeleski, W., & Langbehn, W. (2015). American Foreign Fighters: Implications for Homeland Security. Department of Homeland Security.
Smith, M., Milic-Frayling, N., Shneiderman, B., Mendes Rodrigues, E., Leskovec, J., & Dunne, C. (2010). NodeXL: a free and open network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for Excel 2007/2010.
Schuurman, B., & Taylor, M. (2018). Reconsidering Radicalization: Fanaticism and the Link Between Ideas and Violence. Perspectives on Terrorism, 12(1), 3-22.
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. (2016, July 2016). ISIS Online: Countering Terrorist Radicalization & Recruitment on the Internet & Social Media. Retrieved from The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/hearings/isis-online-countering-terrorist-radicalization-and-recruitment-on-the-internet_social-media
Vidino, L. (2010). Countering radicalization in America. Special Report. United States Institute of Peace.
Vidino, L., & Hughes, S. (2015). ISIS in America: From retweets to Raqqa. The George Washington University Program on Extremism.
von Behr, I., Reding, A., Edwards, C., & Gribbon, L. (2013). Radicalisation in the digital era: The use of the internet in 15 cases of terrorism and extremism. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Retrieved from https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR453.html.
Warrick, J. (2017, August 18). ISIS’s propaganda machine is thriving as the physical caliphate fades. Retrieved from Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/isiss-propaganda-machine-is-thriving-as-the-physical-caliphate-fades/2017/08/18
Weimann, G. (2016). Going Dark: Terrorism on the Dark Web. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 39(3), 195-206.
WIRED. (2016, March). Why ISIS Is Winning the Social Media War. Retrieved from WIRED: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/isis-winning-social-media-war-heres-beat/
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
The JD Journal for Deradicalization uses a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND) Licence. You are free to share - copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format under the following conditions:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, andindicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
