Mediating the Caliphate: Global, Regional and Digital Dimensions of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) grabbed the world’s attention and prompted western military action. It exploited the Syrian civil war and strife in Iraq to seize territory larger than nearby Jordan. With a unique brand of extreme religionist rule and a multi-national fighting force, ISIS announced a new khalifa (Caliphate). Though ISIS aims to achieve this through grotesque violence repressive social control, it narrates its nascent statehood project via multi-faceted media and communication strategies.

ISIS’s Al Hayat media wing is an advanced operation that produces sophisticated, action-movie-like video releases and short documentaries aimed at transnational, multilingual audiences. Its videos weave in battle scenes and staged executions, as its leaders and fighters explain their vision. It re-purposes footage from Grand Theft Auto and other video games in recruitment communications. The online magazines, websites and videos are bolstered by a network of hundreds of aligned, individual social media users who share information and interact with outside observers and news media as ISIS’s de facto representatives. While mainstream news was long seen as terrorism’s “oxygen” (Nacos, 2007), network news and elite newspapers now cover ISIS’s self-produced media in meta-reporting about the group’s messaging.

Through Al-Hayat, ISIS claims to represent a transnational authentic (salafi) Islam and perform monopolization of “the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber, 1965). This contrasts with the progressive impact of new media in the Arab spring (Howard & Hussain, 2013). Moving beyond the utopianism/pessimism dichotomy, this panel examines the new media rhetorics and forms ISIS deploys to seek larger legitimation of its statehood project.

This panel offers a close, multi-method examination of ISIS’s communicative trajectories in the context of regional and external news media’s understanding of the region and public discourse at-large.

The papers apply research on new media, soft power, social movements, global and regional news and conflict in the Middle East. Al-Ghazzi compares global media discourses on new media potentialities for the Arab Middle East between the Arab Spring (2011) and ISIS (2014). Looking at regional media, Yesil positions ISIS within a Turkish media system that reflects larger ambiguities in Turkish policy. Khalil examines the circulation of ISIS beheading videos and how they perform the spectacle of sovereignty by translating murder into state-sanctioned execution. Youmans shows how ISIS’s new media narrative tries to appropriate a secular, historical symbol that resonates with regional and international discourse about the Middle East.

Sub Unit

• Global Communication and Social Change

Chair

• Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics and Political Science

Individual Presentations

• Narratives of Good and Evil: Framing Social Media Use in the Arab World in 2011 and 2014 - Omar Al-Ghazzi, University of Pennsylvania

• Condemning and Legitimizing ISIS: Turkey's Pro-Government, Islamist Media and the Ambiguities of Neo-Ottomanism - Bilge Yesil, CUNY College of Staten Island

• Turning Murders Into Public Executions, ‘Beheading Videos’ as Alternative Media - Joe F. Khalil, Northwestern U in Qatar

• ISIS’s New Media Narrative is Oddly Historical: Appropriating the Sykes-Picot Agreement to Claim Legitimacy - William Lafi Youmans, The George Washington University

Respondent

• Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics and Political Science