Jihadi Cool, Visual Criminology and the ISIS Beheading Videos

• In Event: Cultural Criminology: Trajectories

Abstract

Image production lies at the very heart of terrorist recruitment today. Consider the sophisticated media campaign of ISIS. Google lists an astounding 6 million postings and video clips of ISIS beheadings alone, some unimaginably graphic, which can be downloaded by anyone with a cellphone, meaning nearly everyone. The beheading videos are primarily intended to serve as a recruiting tool for Western youth by projecting ISIS’s courage and power through the synthetic concept of “jihadi cool.” From a Syrian battlefield in August of 2014, for instance, Abdel Bary, a 23-year-old London rapper, uploaded to Twitter a picture of himself holding up a severed head. The caption read: “Chillin’ with my homie or what’s left of him.” This gruesome image cannot be comprehended much less explained with traditional social science research methods. Positivistic criminology, in particular, lacks the language and intellectual framework for describing what Ferrell calls the creative tension between objectivity and subjectivity, between a person’s immersion in the image and the stark immediacy of its meaning. What is needed to understand the image is a method to grasp the complex subjectivities between executioner, victim and spectator. This requires the incorporation of a new set of visual research methods into terrorism studies drawing from the wide-ranging work of cultural criminologists, critical theorists, literary writers, religious scholars, cultural anthropologists and documentary film makers. Collectively, their efforts could potentially unpack the epistemological tension between visual introspection and sociopolitical imperative, leading to greater insights into issues of agency and chaos. That is the foundation needed for a visual criminology of terrorism, one that ultimately allows for a deeper engagement with the sheer politics of cruelty that is the project of all terrorism.

Author

• Mark Hamm, Indiana State University