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“I Am Proud to Be a Traitor”: The emotion/opinion interplay in jihadist magazines
Abstract
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.
... However, a smaller group of users was also identified which blamed the USA, Britain, Saudi Wahhabis and Israel for provoking or hyping this incident, and accused these actors variously of attacking Islam, plotting to defame Iran and the Iranian government, and conspiring to grab power in the region. The underlying claim that there is a culture war between "the West" and Islam, or that Islam is "under attack" is frequently found in discourses associated with radical Islamic ideology (Holbrook 2015;Baker, Vessey, & McEnery, 2021;Benítez-Castro & Hidalgo-Tenorio, 2022). Within this, the representation of Muslims as victims, which is usually generic and associated with large numbers, is particularly characteristic of extremist groups (Baker et al., 2021, p. 82). ...
The hijab is a garment associated with modesty and/or identity worn by Muslim women around the globe. The choice of wearing a hijab is influenced by personal, cultural and societal preferences. However, in countries like Iran and Afghanistan, wearing the hijab is mandatory. This issue is controversial and has always generated media discussion, but events in Iran in 2022 triggered a new debate fuelled by social media such as Twitter. After the death of Mahsa Amini, detained by the Iranian Guidance Patrol or “Morality Police” on 13th September 2022 for allegedly not wearing her hijab in accordance with government standards, the hashtag #MahsaAmini became viral across the world and generated strong reactions on both sides of the issue. The current study is a corpus-assisted sentiment analysis and emotion analysis of tweets trending as #MahsaAmini, aimed at exploring discourses of protest, but also fundamentalism and radicalisation, through analysis of the language used on Twitter about this event.
... However, a smaller group of users was also identified which blamed the USA, Britain, Saudi Wahhabis and Israel for provoking or hyping this incident, and accused these actors variously of attacking Islam, plotting to defame Iran and the Iranian government, and conspiring to grab power in the region. The underlying claim that there is a culture war between "the West" and Islam, or that Islam is "under attack" is frequently found in discourses associated with radical Islamic ideology (Holbrook 2015;Baker, Vessey, & McEnery, 2021;Benítez-Castro & Hidalgo-Tenorio, 2022). Within this, the representation of Muslims as victims, which is usually generic and associated with large numbers, is particularly characteristic of extremist groups (Baker et al., 2021, p. 82). ...
... This being so, we still need to understand the causes behind these processes and gain deeper awareness of what we are facing. As shown in Benítez-Castro and Hidalgo-Tenorio (2022) and Etaywe and Zappavigna (2022), this requires exploring in detail the attitudinal underpinnings of this phenomenon, because it is through our self-and other-construed stances that allegiance to in-groups and hostility to out-groups is conveyed and enacted. In recent years, terrorism researchers have moved away from a profilingbased understanding of radicalisation to focus on the pathways leading to radicalisation, thereby paying more attention to group factors and dynamics (Horgan 2008). ...
Identity conflict and the loss of meaning experienced by some Muslim young people in Western countries are key factors behind fanaticism, leading some of them to find purpose in life within extremist groups (Adam-Troian et al. 2021; Moyano and González 2021). The narrative that emerges from the radicalisation process provides a rich source for psychologists and discourse analysts, exploring not only the ‘why’ and the ‘how’, but also issues stemming from self-perception and other-representation. Such conflict-based narratives materialise in individuals’ evaluative language patterns (Etaywe and Zappavigna 2022). In this paper, we conduct a close
analysis of the discursive construction of emotion and opinion in a collection of semi-structured interviews with social workers or neighbours who knew the perpetrators of the 2017 terrorist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils. To do so, we use corpus-driven methodologies and a refined version of Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal framework (see Benítez-Castro and Hidalgo-Tenorio 2019). Our analysis aims to cast light on the social frictions that may have contributed to their endorsement of violence (Moyano et al. 2021).
Besides being unjustly incarcerated, Sabrina Butler, Kristine Bunch, Ru-el Sailor and Larry DeLisle endured various forms of police mistreatment, as detailed in a collection of transcripts from the Wrongful Conviction Podcast (WCP). Understandably enough, their criminalization had a profound impact on their perception of external and internal realities. Given their unique socio-demographic backgrounds, variations in the discursive patterns of their communicative interactions are anticipated. As extensively analyzed in sociolinguistics, both gender and ethnicity influence how individuals construct discourse; particularly, these traits appear to account for how the subjects under study express their emotions and opinions. This is because they are silenced and unable to directly confront their trauma; often, they are incapable of discussing their feelings or identifying those responsible for these traumatic events. Drawing on Appraisal Theory, this paper investigates the language of evaluation used in these texts taken from the WCP. To this end, our analysis of the data is performed using UAM CorpusTool.
This paper reports on an appraisal analysis of a representative sample of 32 posts, and associated comments, on a Chinese political web forum, which is a first attempt to critically apply the appraisal framework to this context. One of the key findings is that the Chinese contributors to this forum judged the behaviour of others by relying to a great extent on assumed references and cultural knowledge. This ‘insider’ knowledge, in particular the perceived social status of the target group, is realised using different kinds of appraisal resources, mostly of the invoked type, with some of these resources different to those commonly used by native English speakers in similar contexts. The use of such resources enabled contributors to express negative judgement of people they perceived to be in the elite, as well as towards other nation-states. In this paper, we identify status-sensitive linguistic resources that invoke attitudes in this context, and thus propose to split the appraisal category of judgement: social sanction: propriety into ethics-based propriety and social-hierarchy-based propriety . We discuss how these resources are deployed by the contributors to position others in ways that depend on both knowledge of cultural context and the online communicative context in which these interactions take place.
Substantial research has drawn upon the notion of interpersonal metafunction proposed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to approach the interpersonal meanings construed in different contexts. However, there is a lack of review on the recent research of this domain. The objective of this paper is to survey the patterns and trends of literature on interpersonal metafunction in SFL tradition and guide future research. This paper reviews 160 studies published from 2012 to 2022. Four themes emerge from the review: theoretical explorations, multilingual studies, discourse analysis, and language education. These contributions shed light on the applicability and flexibility of SFL as a theoretical tool across a wide range of genres and languages. The four streams of research are guided by the fundamental concepts of SFL and interrelated by the concept of context and the tenet of language as social semiotic. Future directions lie in theoretical model refinement, methodological developments, typological descriptions of interpersonal grammar, and the extension of application areas.
Linguistic analysis of the interpersonal patterning of threatening communication is a means of uncovering the attitudes, ideological orientation, and hostile intentions of perpetrators of violence in terrorist discourse ( Gales 2010 , 2011 ). Corpus analysis focused on attitudinal meaning also offers a diagnostic for characterizing the personal and relational identities ( Bednarek 2010 ) manifest in such texts. This paper explores discursive patterns of authorial identity in terrorist communication in a set of post-9/11 terrorist public statements made by former al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden. It draws on the Appraisal framework ( Martin and White 2005 ), a model of evaluative language developed within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), to investigate the interpersonal component in this dataset. Specifically, patterns of attitude provide evidence of relational and actional attitude, and personal and relational identities. Negative judgement was found to characterize the encoded attitude in terms of (i) construing aggression and conflicting moral values (e.g., social sanction underpinning a perceived personal duty) and (ii) enacting the author’s aggressive and aloof identity, and violent actional attitude.
The backgrounds and modus operandi of more recent jihadi terrorists tend to share factors and characteristics more typically associated with non-political violence such as mass-killings and gang violence. Their attacks, moreover, seem to have been precipitated not by the direct instructions of a formal hierarchy but by the encouragement of propaganda produced and disseminated by networked, media-savvy terrorist groups. It is necessary to explain how these “recruitment” efforts work. Cultural criminology, with its understanding of the relationship between mediated meaning and individual experience, can provide such an analysis. The article presents a qualitative document analysis of 32 propaganda magazines produced by the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda. It demonstrates that they contain significantly more than religious rhetoric and military strategy. Rather, they are part of a process that crystalizes a jihadi subculture that appeals to disaffected and/or marginalized, excitement-seeking youths. The magazines cultivate violence by constructing a militarized style that celebrates outlaw status, where violence is eroticized and aestheticized. They idealize the notion of a jihadi terrorist that is tough and willing to commit brutal violence. The lifestyle portrayed offers the possibility of heroism, excitement, belonging and imminent fame, themes often espoused by conventional, Western consumer culture. The magazines occasionally draw on street jargon, urban music, fashion, films, and video games. The subcultural model of jihadi propaganda we explicate provides a novel way of understanding terrorist recruiting tactics and motivations that are not necessarily in opposition to contemporary conventional criminal and “mainstream” cultures, but in resonance with them.
This article explores the language of violent jihad, focussing upon lexis encoding concepts from Islam. Through the use of correlation statistics, this article demonstrates that the words encoding such concepts distribute in dependent relationships across different types of texts. The correlation between the words cannot be simply explained in terms of collocation; rather, the correlation is evidence of other forms of cohesion at work in the texts. The variation in patterns of cohesion across a spectrum of texts from those advocating violence to those which do not promote violence demonstrates how these concepts are contested and redefined by violent jihadists and the role that collocation and other forms of cohesion can play in the process. This article concludes that the terms, and their redefinition, are a key part of the symbolic capital used by groups to create identities which licence violence.
Research into the roots of ideological extremism has traditionally focused on the social, economic, and demographic factors that make people vulnerable to adopting hostile attitudes toward outgroups. However, there is insufficient empirical work on individual differences in implicit cognition and information processing styles that amplify an individual’s susceptibility to endorsing violence to protect an ideological cause or group. Here we present original evidence that objectively assessed cognitive inflexibility predicts extremist attitudes, including a willingness to harm others, and sacrifice one’s life for the group. Across two samples (N = 1,047) from the United Kingdom and United States, structural equation models demonstrated that cognitive inflexibility predicted endorsement of violence to protect the national ingroup, which in turn predicted a willingness to die for the group. These statistical models accounted for an average of 31.4% of the variance in willingness to die for the group, after accounting for demographic variables. Furthermore, cognitive inflexibility was related to greater confidence in the decision to sacrifice one’s life in an ingroup trolley problem scenario. Analysis of participants’ performance on the cognitive tasks revealed that cognitive rigidity – distinctly from other aspects of cognition – was specifically implicated as a cognitive antecedent of extremist attitudes. Implications for the study of radicalization and identity fusion through a neurocognitive lens are discussed.
The present study aims to explore how narratives, stories, and memories are planted in the Jihadists’ mind. In particular, the primary concern of this study is the interests of Indonesian Muslims to join Jihadist groups and their willingness to sacrifice possessions, families, and even lives. Five main informants who are members of Jihadi groups in Indonesia and 18 additional informants who have been linked with key informants participated in this study. The findings revealed the motivation of personal significance through 4 steps of radicalization. We found that the narratives of the Jihadists were an expression of the self-worth that is motivated by the need to increase the quest for significance in God’s eyes. This study highlights the importance of alternatives to meaning in societies that are available and accessible by Jihadists to facilitate their reaching a self-fulfilled identity. This self-fulfillment may prevent the Jihadists from being manipulated by leaders from radical groups to perform a radical collective action.
Despite a growing awareness of methodological issues, the literature on appraisal has not so far provided adequate answers to some of the key challenges involved in reliably identifying and classifying evaluative language expressions. This article presents a stepwise method for the manual annotation of appraisal in text that is designed to optimize reliability, replicability and transparency. The procedure consists of seven steps, from the creation of a context-specific annotation manual to the statistical analysis of the quantitative data derived from the manually-performed annotations. By presenting this method, the article pursues the twofold purpose of (i) providing a practical tool that can facilitate more reliable, replicable and transparent analyses, and (ii) fostering a discussion of the best practices that should be observed when manually annotating appraisal .
This article is part of an effort to understand the enthusiasm, attraction, and admiration of the organization ISIS among the young Muslim female in Western Europe. The article specifically focuses on Microblogging (Tumblr and Twitter) contents of young Muslim girls from Western Europe. The study offers a review of ISIS-adoring Tumblr fangirls in the West through the prism of cultural interpretation. The young girls, whether themselves manipulated or manipulating others, become part of a worldwide viral system produced in perfect unison and generating propaganda enticing more and younger Muslim girls in the West to become viral ISIS recruits. After maintaining for a while Tumblr and Twitter accounts some of them even undergo the "Giant Leap" and migrate to the "Islamic state" in Syria, continuing there to reinforce their blogging and twittering efforts reporting on their daily lives and attempting to tempt or to trap more young girls to join the new "Islamic state".
Utterance production/interpretation depends unmistakably on emotional contexts. This makes the analysis of emotion in language fascinating and difficult, as it permeates all levels of linguistic description. Martin & White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory is a powerful instrument intended to capture the subtleties of emotion in discourse. Its status as an open-ended tool, though, reveals a need for more sharply defined categories. Whilst the APPRECIATION subsystem has been elaborated in Hommerberg & Don (2015) or Lee (2015), AFFECT seems to require further refinement (cf., however, Bednarek 2008). In this chapter, we do so by using corpus evidence and drawing inspiration mainly from three psychological approaches to emotion: appraisal theories, construction theories and neuroscience. In emphasizing the notion of goal as the foundation of all emotion types, our revised model aims to describe emotional instances in more detail.
The Islamic State (IS) has become notorious for violent, brutal actions and the presentation of these actions in social and mainstream media. Excessive violence creates a spectacle for the news media. However, IS propaganda also emphasizes its role in state building and its engagement in social and welfare work. This twofold propaganda enables the mobilization of different audiences, but it also sends conflicting messages about the organization. In this article, we study the e-magazine Dabiq, emphasizing its methods of gaining support and attempting to recruit Western participants to violent jihadism. We use theories of social movement and subculture to reveal some of the underlying tensions in IS’s communicative strategies. The analysis first identifies how IS frames its propaganda, attempting to mobilize widespread support. Then, it highlights another dimension of IS’s rhetoric: provocations, the creation of sensationalist spectacles of violence and links to excitement seeking, stardom, and popular culture. We conclude that combining general anti-Western rhetoric and religious imagery with extraordinary depictions of violence has been both a strength and flaw in the organization’s propaganda.
At the height of its power, ISIS was perceived as the biggest contemporary terrorist threat to world security. In this paper, we analyze the phenomenon of ISIS and its unique history through the lens of general social psychological principles that might have contributed to its stunning—even if only temporary—success. We suggest that ISIS represents a special case of a radical group born of the conjunction between psychological needs, an ideological narrative, and a networking process. We describe the details of ISIS’s evolution and operation in order to shed light on this threatening movement.
Although the involvement of women in terrorist activities is not new, it is still considered to be an exceptional phenomenon. The figure of a woman militant contradicts the main gender constructions and thus produces a certain shock and disconcertment in societies. In the case of “Jihadism”, women who willingly join a terrorist organisation also challenge the Western Neo-Orientalist perspective on Muslim women in the West. Starting from these theoretical standpoints, this article focuses on a group of terrorists who have recently received a great deal of attention: ISIS women jihadis. Based on a critical discourse analysis of three main UK broadsheets, this article presents, deconstructs and problematises the main depictions that were used to describe these subjects. Furthermore, it discusses how the frames described reconcile these women’s actions with the gender and Neo-Orientalist constructions that circulate in Western societies, safeguarding the deriving hegemonic narratives. In other words, the article focuses on how women terrorists are made into “Jihadi Brides”.
We investigate differences in the psychological aspects underpinning Western mobilisation of two terrorist groups by analysing their English-language propaganda. Based on a computerised analysis of the language used in two English-language online magazines circulated by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al-Qaeda (i.e., Dabiq and Inspire), we found significant differences in their language—the ISIS’ language being higher in authoritarianism and its level of religiousness. In a follow-up experimental study, we found that being high in religiousness and authoritarianism predicts more positive attitudes towards the language used by ISIS, but not towards the language used by al-Qaeda. The results suggest that ISIS’ propaganda may be more effective in mobilising individuals who are more authoritarian and more focused on religion than that of al-Qaeda. These findings are consistent with the behaviour observed in recent homegrown terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.
In this article, the authors theorize the communicative logic of ISIS online death videos—from the burning and shooting of individual hostages to mass battleground executions. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s reflections on contemporary violence, they demonstrate how ISIS’ digital spectacles of the annihilated body confront Western viewers with horror— or rather with different “regimes of horrorism” (grotesque, abject and sublime horror). These spectacles of horror, the authors argue, mix Western with Islamic aesthetic practices and secular with religious moral claims so as to challenge dominant hierarchies of grievability (who is worthy of our grief) and norms of subjectivity. In so doing, the authors conclude, ISIS introduces into global spaces of publicity a “spectacular thanatopolitics”—a novel form of thanatopolitics that brings the spectacle of the savaged body, banished from display since the 19th century, back to the public stage, thereby turning the pursuit of death into the new norm of heroic subjectivity.
The Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) continues to use social media as an essential element of its campaign to motivate support. On Twitter, ISIS’ unique ability to leverage unaffiliated sympathizers that simply retweet propaganda has been identified as a primary mechanism in their success in motivating both recruitment and “lone wolf” attacks. The present work explores a large community of Twitter users whose activity supports ISIS propaganda diffusion in varying degrees. Within this ISIS supporting community, we observe a diverse range of actor types, including fighters, propagandists, recruiters, religious scholars, and unaffiliated sympathizers. The interaction between these users offers unique insight into the people and narratives critical to ISIS’ sustainment. In their entirety, we refer to this diverse set of users as an online extremist community or OEC. We present Iterative Vertex Clustering and Classification (IVCC), a scalable analytic approach for OEC detection in annotated heterogeneous networks, and provide an illustrative case study of an online community of over 22,000 Twitter users whose online behavior directly advocates support for ISIS or contibutes to the group’s propaganda dissemination through retweets.
The present article examines the relevance of jihadist propaganda as an indicator of the threat from terrorism. To that end, it uses jihadist propaganda output referring to Spain as a case study. It proposes an instrument of measurement based on content analysis, in which the origin, format, content, and distribution method of the materials are taken as categories. The results offer empirical evidence regarding the seriousness of the terrorist threat against Spain, a country that is particularly exposed due to its historical and geographical singularities and its status as the victim of an attack deemed paradigmatic in the minds of jihadists.
This article examines the “Islamic State” (IS) phenomenon that has shaken the Middle East since the summer of 2014 as well as its large-scale security implications. To this end the article provides a brief historical background on IS, explores and defines its organizational character, as well as identifies and evaluates the different kinds of security threats posed by IS at the regional and global levels. The argument is that IS is not a typical case of a terrorist organization. It is rather a fusion of a state, an insurgency, and a terrorist organization that could be best described as a “quasi-state.” Further, the security threats posed by IS are categorized into conventional and asymmetrical (or nonconventional) ones. The former regard the regional level, while the latter can even have global repercussions. The article concludes with an assessment of IS's most important security threats and highlights the importance of dealing with its extremist ideology and the conditions that fuel it.
The propaganda magazine of the terrorist group Islamic State (IS), entitled Dabiq , displays IS' utilization of different representations of youth to convert a new generation of jihadi fighters . This study analyzes why IS uses youth in its propaganda and what functions of discourse these representations serve. This article is a qualitative content analysis of the Dabiq magazines with direct reference to Henry Giroux's theory of the myth of childhood innocence, which portrays youths as passive victims. The evolution of representations of youth in Dabiq aligns with this myth, as the publications tend to give active and violent roles to youth in order to foster new social paradigms.
Politics and emotions have always gone together. The German sociologist, Max Weber, famously observed that action in a political community is ‘determined by highly robust motives of fear and hope’ (Weber 1970, p. 79). It is of interest that almost identical statements were expressed at the very beginning of the period of early modern politics. The English statesman and philosopher, Francis Bacon, wrote that ‘civil states’ offer bribes and punishments, ‘employing the predominant affections of fear and hope’, a possibility that arises from the fact that the ‘government of states’ relies upon ‘the government within’ (Bacon 1905, p. 145; emphasis in original). Similarly, the French writer, Jean-François Senault, in De l’Usage des Passions first published in1641 and translated into English only a short time later, wrote:
Policy seems to have better intentions than Rhetorick; for when she excites fear or hope in man, by promises or by threats, she endeavours the welfare of particulars (Senault 1671, p. 174).
The media coverage of terrorist acts has been the subject of numerous scientific studies. However, the terrorist groups’ own communication perspectives have not been thoroughly researched. The following article deals with terrorist groups and their use of websites for identity building. We examine the discursive construction of terrorist group identity through critical discourse analysis (CDA). The CDA of online texts from websites of terrorist groups is based on a five macro-strategy scheme. Our sample consists of six terrorist groups, with each group of two sharing different motivations: social-revolutionary, ethno-nationalist, or religious. All the groups analyzed are listed as terrorist organizations by the European Union. The CDA of 27 terrorist websites, purposively sampled, was conducted using two coders per site. Through this analysis, the researchers draw conclusions on strategies employed by terrorist organizations in building identity and how to counter their unregulated propaganda.
This article analyses Dabiq magazine to explore the strategic logic of Islamic State (IS) appeals to English-speaking Muslims. It offers the field a conceptual framework through which to analyse IS’s communications strategy and a top-down empirical study of Dabiq’s contents. This paper argues that Dabiq appeals to its audiences by strategically designing in-group identity, Other, solution and crisis constructs which it leverages via value-, crisis- and dichotomy-reinforcing narratives. By fusing identity- and rational-choice appeals, IS provides its audiences with a powerful ‘competitive system of meaning’ that is designed to shape its readership’s perceptions, polarise their support and drive their radicalisation.
“Who is in control of the narrative?” is the mantra that now echoes in the hallways of the EU’s headquarters in Brussels. Spurred in part by large-scale jihadist propaganda, approximately 20,000 people from 50 countries have joined the fight in Iraq and Syria. So far, authorities in their countries of origin have not been able to address the jihadist radicalisation messages transmitted via the internet and social media. Many new initiatives were recently announced, however, including the establishment of a European counter-narrative centre in Brussels.
Research Fellow Dr. Bibi van Ginkel analyses the role of the internet and social media in processes of radicalisation. It offers an outline of the various aspects of the jihadist narrative, in order better to understand what message needs to be countered. The counter-actions against this cyber jihad can take different forms. Parallel to the way in which advertisement campaigns are tailored to sell products to a certain target group, strategic communication should take into account how a number of recurring elements play a role in the counter-messaging. The understanding of who the target group is, what jihadist narrative is used and how that message can be countered, who the credible messenger should be, and what medium can best be used to deliver the message are all relevant questions that can only be answered in a context-specific manner. The Research Paper concludes with several recommendations on how the recently announced new European counter-narrative centre can effectively contribute to the already diverse landscape of counter-narrative initiatives.
Despite widespread recognition that the use of counternarratives is an important strategic component of countering violent extremism, to date, there are no comprehensive guidelines on how to develop and distribute counternarratives to effectively reduce support for terrorism. To redress this, we offer communication and psychology theory-based procedures for (1) analyzing terrorist narratives, (2) constructing counternarratives that challenge terrorist narratives, and (3) disseminating the counternarratives to overcome barriers to persuasion. Analysts and practitioners can use such guidelines in developing counternarratives to reduce support for violent extremism.
Manual corpus annotation facilitates exhaustive and detailed corpusbased analyses of evaluation that would not be possible with purely automatic techniques. However, manual annotation is a complex and subjective process. Most studies adopting this approach have paid insufficient attention to the methodological challenges involved in manually annotating evaluation - especially concerning transparency, reliability and replicability. This article illustrates a procedure for annotating evaluative expressions in text that facilitates more transparent, reliable and replicable analyses. The method is demonstrated through a case study analysis of APPRAISAL (Martin andWhite, 2005) in a small-size specialised corpus of CEO letters published by the British energy company, BP, and four competitors before and after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. Drawing on Fuoli and Paradis's (2014) model of trust-repair discourse, we examine how ATTITUDE and ENGAGEMENT resources are strategically deployed by BP's CEO in the attempt to repair stakeholders' trust after the accident.
Lone-wolf terrorism has been regarded as a serious threat to public safety in recent years. Moreover, the phenomenon appears to be increasing at an alarming rate. However, the gap between the perceived threat of lone-wolf terrorism, on the one hand, and the almost exclusive scholarly focus on group-based terrorism, on the other hand, indicates the need for more conceptual and empirical examinations of the lone-wolf terrorism. One perspective highlighted in this article is the use of online communication platforms. Lone-wolf terrorism has been regarded as a serious threat to public safety in recent years. After reviewing the role of these platforms for lone-wolf terrorists in general and for the “new” al-Qaeda, in particular, the paper concludes with proposed potential counter-terrorism measures applicable to this new arena.
In most holiday destinations, high summer naturally means high season, but around the capital cities of Europe the streets are often practically deserted. This makes July and August the perfect time to catch up on your culture so whilst the Parisians flock to Corsica or the Cote d’Azur, you can enjoy Paris without the traffic jams and experience the city’s many open spaces at their best. Barcelona is perfect for a summer break, and you can be both culture vulture and beach bum depending on your mood.
Recursively in history, emotions such as social anger, moral satiety, distrust of the elite and the Establishment, among others, have all contributed to politicians’ encouragement and exploitation of a rather emotionally charged discourse (Block and Negrine 2017). In their self-imposed capacity as mouthpiece for the people, populist leaders have successfully given vent to the expression of some of these emotions. The fact that emotion permeates all levels of linguistic description (Alba-Juez and Thompson 2014, 10-11) makes its examination a fascinating enterprise. In this paper, we discuss the role played by emotion in the production of populist discourse; to this end, we examine a very well-known example of populist rhetoric, i.e. Donald Trump, under the lens of Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005; Bednarek 2008). In particular, we employ a refined model of the AFFECT subsystem (i.e. Benítez-Castro and Hidalgo-Tenorio 2019) to analyse seven speeches delivered by the US President in the last four years. Our study helps uncover a set of strategies and patterns showing how this unconventional politician’s emotion-driven language manages to develop a more inclusive in-group identity uniting the members of an angry, scared, frustrated and unsure audience.
Keywords: populist discourse; discourse analysis; Appraisal Theory; emotion; Donald Trump
FREE COPIES AT: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/M6PGMZKGAVDYCUSUIWIJ/full?target=10.1080/14767724.2020.1861540
It is now an acknowledged fact in the world of linguistics that the concept of evaluation is crucial, and that there is very little – if any – discourse that cannot be analyzed through the prism of its evaluative content. This book presents some of the latest developments in the study of this phenomenon. Released more than a decade later than Hunston and Thompson’s (2000) Evaluation in Text, Evaluation in Context is designed as its sequel, in an attempt to continue, update and extend the different avenues of research opened by the earlier work. Both theoretical and empirical studies on the topic are presented, with the intention of scrutinizing as many of its dimensions as possible, by not only looking at evaluative texts, but also considering the aspects of the discursive context that affect the final evaluative meaning at both the production and reception stages of the evaluative act. The editors’ main objective has been to gather contributions which investigate the manifold faces and phases of evaluation by presenting a wide variety of perspectives that include different linguistic theories (e.g. Axiological Semantics, Functionalism or Politeness Theory), different levels of linguistic description (e.g. phonological, lexical or semantic), and different text types and contexts (e.g. the evaluation found in ironic discourse, the multimodality of media discourse or the world of politics, just to name a few). The volume can be of use not only for scholars who study the evaluative function of language, but also for students who wish to pursue research in the area.
Discourse practices are investigated in English and Polish online comments which display different degrees of linguistic extremism. The present contribution identifies the contexts and targets of such practices and argues that hate speech is conditioned by culture-driven emotional experience and emotion expression profiles prevailing in particular societies. The discussion focuses on Polish and UK English emotionality and on relevant cultural models of the negative emotion clusters identified in Polish and English online political and social comments in posts collected between 2013 and 2018 on topics connected mainly, though not exclusively, with migration and the perception of the Other. First, the article shows that there are differences in the display and expression of emotions between English and Polish discourses, the latter being more negatively explicit and more often addressing the current online interactant. Second, in both groups, two opposing camps are identified. Finally, the rise in meaning and expressiveness of radicalization is observed in both English and Polish across the investigated period.
Social Networking Sites (SNS) have entailed a revolution for society. They have given a say to everyone regardless of their status and this has been translated into loads of data. The task of profiling users constitutes a way to learn from this data in order to show users only the content that is relevant to them. Several recommendation system techniques have been used to address this problem, being mainly based on what the user explicitly says about themselves, on what the user publishes in the SNS and on the similarities between users. However, in social media context, it is also possible to use relations between users. Considering basic relations like follower or followee to extract information from them may result in noise, since they do not imply that users share interest or even ideas. In this work, we present a fuzzy framework to enrich user profiles with complex properties in order to have an even better representation of them. We use basic relations defined by SNSs to complete the information available in user profiles with topics of interest and ideas towards them and to define deep relations that will enable new ways of analysis. We use these deep relations to create clusters of similar users that, ultimately, will allow the expansion of properties from known users to the rest of the cluster. We tested our proposal with a dataset of Tweets in Spanish related to a political event. Our experiments prove the potential that this approach has for a lot of applications in microblogging context.
This study takes a lexical-grammatical approach to exploring the evaluation of human behaviour and/or character. It uses adjective complementation patterns as the starting point to examine the lexical-grammatical resources at risk in the appraisal system of JUDGEMENT, aiming to explore the extent to which we can arrive at the same categorization of the resources realizing JUDGEMENT if a formal or lexical-grammatical approach, rather than a discourse-semantic one, is taken. Using a corpus compiled of texts categorized as ‘Biography’ in the British National Corpus, the study, on the one hand, shows that most of the items identified can be very satisfactorily classified in terms posited in the JUDGEMENT system, suggesting that the nomenclature from that model is useful. On the other hand, a considerable number of items have also been identified which construe attitudes towards emotional types of personality traits, leading to the proposal of a potentially useful new judgement category and further an adjusted system of JUDGEMENT. The heuristic potential of aligning the lexical-grammatical and discourse-semantic approaches to appraisal is further discussed.
The key question from a marketing perspective is why has Islamic State (IS) been so successful and how did it displace Al Qaeda (AQ) as the most prominent brand of global jihad from 2014 to 2016? The political and military elements have been examined but comparatively little attention has been paid to the ability of IS to commandeer the AQ narrative by appropriating and extending key themes and using them via social media to market itself as a choice for disaffected youth. It is suggested that IS has done this by making skilful use of rhetoric to position its brand and facilitate recruitment. To illustrate this, eight major themes of jihadi social media communications are identified and then analysed. Then a comparison is made between the way that AQ has used these themes in the online journal Inspire and the way that IS has used them in their online journals, Dabiq and Rumiyah.
This article presents findings from an empirical study of 39 issues of five online terrorist magazines in order to problematise the concept of religious terrorism. The presentation of the study’s findings focuses on the magazines’ textual content, examining the types of textual item each magazine contains, how the producers of the magazines perceive the publications, the justifications the magazines offer for the groups’ activities and the motivations that underlie these activities. This analysis shows that there are important differences between the messages each group expounds. These differences, the article argues, are obscured by the homogeneous label “religious terrorism”. Moreover, an examination of these groups’ messages shows that the purported distinction between religion and politics is unsustainable and has detrimental political-normative repercussions.
The recent rise of religious militancy in Muslim countries has been explained either in theological idiom or as an offshoot of national, regional, and international geopolitics. However, such analyses have often ignored micro-level actors in Jihadi ventures, leaving the breeding grounds at the grassroots unexplored. The meta-narratives articulated by these actors have privileged traditional hegemony at the cost of the social, which is complex. This article explores the dynamics of power and identity in the context of Jihad at the level of the individual, family, and Jihadi organizations, focusing on the participation of Pakistani civilians in cross-border violent conflicts in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Applying Foucault’s concept of power as the framework for analysis, this article demonstrates that the desire to exercise power, rather than any commitment to some divine project, is the major reason behind decisions to join Jihadi organizations. Identities based on gender, age, class. education, social status, and ethnicity were employed as instruments in the theater of power. In a complex process. multiple factors brought individuals into the ambit of Jihadi organizations to undertake violent actions.
Why do young Muslim women radicalize and undertake high-risk political behaviors, and what factors influence their sociopolitical transformation? The process of radicalization happens because of individual, social, and political dynamics, and is facilitated by the availability of computer-mediated communication. Some young Muslim women keep detailed records of their radicalization process via social media, which we use to understand their sociopolitical transformation. By evaluating their language, we can better understand how their personal, social, and political development unfolds. This paper is a case study examining the words of one young Muslim woman, Aqsa Mahmood, who moved from her home in Scotland to join the ISIS fighters in Syria. Her Tumblr blog provides a linguistic, political, and ideological record of the process of her radicalization. We identify linguistic patterns in her blog posts that can help to develop and reveal a typology of the language of female radicalization.
This paper examines the controversial figure of the ‘Jihadi Bride’ through her visual depictions in media discourses where she is associated with danger, conflict and the evil Other. Such depictions often draw heavily on the Orientalist gaze of the Middle East in conflict; its atavism, servitude of womanhood and the incongruence of religion for secular modernity. These media discourses equally draw on the imagination of the internet as a space for the loss of innocence and for luring the vulnerable into inexplicable darkness. This paper, by drawing on the concept of desire and its relationship to the screen as well as the concept of ‘new media visuality’ where pervasive consumption of imagery mediates reality and fantasy, as well as sexuality and the forbidden, argues that the Jihadi Bride is a product of modernity and not of doctrine. As a technological subject with an insatiable desire ignited through the screen, the Jihadi Bride is a consequence of modernity and its invocation of desire sustained through the screen. The Jihadi Bride is equally part of a mediated visuality where viral circulation and instant gratification reconfigure notions of proximity and intimacy, and straddles earthly desires with the ethereal.
This book offers new insights into how English speakers talk about their own and others' emotions. Using statistical evidence and corpus-linguistic methods, but also qualitative text analyses, the author examines how expressions that describe emotions are employed in a large corpus of conversational, newspaper, fictional and academic English. © Monika Bednarek 2008. Foreword, J.R. Martin 2008. All rights reserved.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine has received attention within Western academia and media for its role in inspiring and instructing a series of homegrown terrorist attacks. Reporting on the magazine often characterises it as a Western-centric instrument of jihadi discourse. This characterisation, while broadly accurate, is in need of refinement. Using a modified version of Jennifer Attride-Stirling’s method of thematic network analysis, this research visualises and analyses the narrative themes contained within fourteen issues of Inspire magazine. It demonstrates that the magazine’s narrative extends well beyond the Western world. In reality, Inspire’s themes centre not only on the West and its Muslim populations, but on local politics and broader religious issues. The magazine’s thematic focus has also shifted over time—particularly in response to (a) political volatility in the Middle East and North Africa, (b) the killing of prominent jihadists, and (c) the execution of successful individual jihad operations. Throughout these periods of change, Inspire struggled to maintain focus on its anti-Western narrative and proved easily distracted by local issues and the “martyrdom” of Al Qaeda leaders. Understanding Inspire’s thematic landscape and its shifting character prove important in understanding and responding effectively to its jihadi discourse.
This is the first comprehensive account of the Appraisal Framework. The underlying linguistic theory is explained and justified, and the application of this flexible tool, which has been applied to a wide variety of text and discourse analysis issues, is demonstrated throughout by sample text analyses from a range of registers, genres and fields.
Based on extensive scrutiny of primary sources from Nazi and Jihadist ideologues, David Patterson argues that Jihadist antisemitism stems from Nazi ideology. This book challenges the idea that Jihadist antisemitism has medieval roots, identifying its distinctively modern characteristics and tracing interconnections that link the Nazis to the Muslim Brotherhood to the PLO, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, the Sudan, the Iranian Islamic Republic, and other groups with an antisemitic worldview. Based on his close reading of numerous Jihadist texts, Patterson critiques their antisemitic teachings and affirms the importance of Jewish teaching, concluding that humanity needs the very Jewish teaching and testimony that the Jihadists advocate destroying.
It is now an acknowledged fact in the world of linguistics that the concept of evaluation is crucial, and that there is very little – if any – discourse that cannot be analyzed through the prism of its evaluative content. This book presents some of the latest developments in the study of this phenomenon. Released more than a decade later than Hunston and Thompson’s (2000) Evaluation in Text, Evaluation in Context is designed as its sequel, in an attempt to continue, update and extend the different avenues of research opened by the earlier work. Both theoretical and empirical studies on the topic are presented, with the intention of scrutinizing as many of its dimensions as possible, by not only looking at evaluative texts, but also considering the aspects of the discursive context that affect the final evaluative meaning at both the production and reception stages of the evaluative act. The editors’ main objective has been to gather contributions which investigate the manifold faces and phases of evaluation by presenting a wide variety of perspectives that include different linguistic theories (e.g. Axiological Semantics, Functionalism or Politeness Theory), different levels of linguistic description (e.g. phonological, lexical or semantic), and different text types and contexts (e.g. the evaluation found in ironic discourse, the multimodality of media discourse or the world of politics, just to name a few). The volume can be of use not only for scholars who study the evaluative function of language, but also for students who wish to pursue research in the area.