Articles of the month: July 2020

This study explores whether social roles mentioned in jihadist literature can be used linguistically to profile the behavior of its consumers. It seeks to empirically understand extremist forums, where such ideological communication is widely disseminated, and to identify different types of user behavior through their discussions in these communities. An Arabic-language corpus was constructed with 1050 users categorized into seven behavioral profiles derived from distinct patterns of communication observed among users in forum networks. Statistical key term extraction was used to find significant social roles referenced in users’ posts as these were proposed to differentiate their behavioral profiles. Multinomial logistic regression and post hoc tests were used to find the frequency of identified roles as the highest-ranking terms capable of prediction. Role terms produced high accuracy scores across classification experiments in identifying behavioral profiles (95% CI, 0.92–0.98), with varying intra- and inter-behavioral differentiation abilities emerging from the authority, religion, closeness, and conflict themes of social roles. This suggests simple and complex predictive potential exist in these constructs for separating profiles based on nuanced expressions of social roles by different types of users in extremist contexts, as was the case for distinguishing extremist organizations through their ideological communication in earlier work.

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the Islamic State's use of images taken by drones, drawing on a dataset of ISIS propaganda images from October 2016 to December 2018. Analysing the three principal uses of drone imagery by ISIS—images of drone strikes, images of other attacks and observation—we argue that ISIS's use of drones distinguishes itself from other state and non-state uses of drones primarily by its communicative and symbolic value. While ISIS’ use of drone strikes takes place in a tactical rather than strategic setting, its employment of drones to film VBIED attacks allows them to achieve a strategic effect. After outlining ISIS’ use of drones for combat air support and to film ground (particularly VBIED) attacks, we argue, drawing on political geography, that ISIS employs drones in propaganda to stake and reinforce a claim to sovereign control of territory, performed through the flying of aircraft. The use of drone imagery, we argue, taps into long-standing visual and discursive strategies which associate vertical hierarchy and flying with mastery and control, allowing ISIS to display attributes of aerial sovereignty. This article, through an analysis of ISIS drone propaganda, provides a rare insight into non-state actors’ perception of drones and the communicative value of drone images, in addition to suggesting further avenues for the incorporation of political–geographical studies of verticality into the study of political violence and rhetoric.

Recent studies find that the presence of foreign fighters in a rebel organization may increase levels of anti-civilian violence in civil war. But why? Evidence from some cases indicates that foreign fighters may be used intentionally by local rebel commanders to carry out abusive operations against noncombatants. Other cases, however, suggest that foreign fighters possess greater capacity for independent agency in war, stepping outside the chain of command to inflict harm against local noncombatants. We argue that variation in a rebel group’s command structure—specifically, their degree of centralization—offers a point of leverage with which to adjudicate between the generalizability of these competing explanations. We investigate this issue with an analysis of sixty nine rebel groups active between 1989 and 2015. We find that the effect of foreign fighters on civilian targeting is conditional: foreign fighters are associated with greater levels of anti-civilian violence only when active in groups with centralized command structures. This study contributes to the nascent literature on foreign fighters, offering insight into how these actors step into the command structures of rebel organizations. This study also demonstrates that the abuse of civilians in conflict can be explained effectively based on the characteristics of armed parties.

Violent radicalization is a complex process that results from multiple influences and experiences across the settings and contexts of an individual’s life. No single pathway or characteristic determines who is at risk for it. Given this understanding, no single intervention aimed at this multiply-determined problem is likely to be successful if it is implemented in isolation. Multidisciplinary team approaches are increasingly seen as holding promise in the prevention and intervention of violent radicalization in the United States and internationally. A multidisciplinary team is typically a group of professionals who are members of different fields of study (psychology, medicine, social work, etc.) who provide a specific service to an individual. Team members independently focus on the issues in which they specialize and activities of the team are coordinated with a common goal. This paper aims to extend current knowledge by addressing questions related to challenges in implementing a multidisciplinary team approach with the capacity to address violent radicalization, presenting potential solutions to these challenges as well as highlighting one multidisciplinary team, Community Connect, that successfully worked with youth identified as being at risk for violence.

n this article I describe how recognizing elements from my own extremist past made me emotional while interviewing a jailed terrorist about his motivations for joining Islamic State. I relate how this mood led me to an uncontrolled self-disclosure and recount how he agreed to elaborate on his motivations for joining IS, despite initial reluctance to talk about them. Then, I present some considerations on whether research in which emotional attachment is involved can produce critical scientific knowledge. The basic aim of the article is to develop methods, concepts and means to contribute to research on the motivations of terrorists.

While the recent literature on hybrid warfare has focused overwhelmingly on Russia, military tactical hybridity among non-state actors has received less attention, and minimal comparative examination. This is surprising as the range of non-state actors successfully using hybridized irregular-conventional tactics (increasingly symmetrically) against states has grown. Examining this phenomenon comparatively in three divergent cases (Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Houthi Movement), this article tests an often-overlooked argument stating that military hybridity among non-state actors is a result of these groups’ common adoption of a specific form of Maoist-style warfare strategy – emulative insurgency.

In recent years, a burgeoning literature has emerged on the relationship between religion and conflict. Contradictory theories address the dynamics and termination of religious violent conflicts. Some studies focus on the destructive role of religion, arguing that religious conflicts are longer, more violent, and intractable. Others argue that religion has an ambivalent role, both destructive and constructive, and recognize religion as a force for peacebuilding. This study focuses on the relationship between religion and conflict termination by examining termination outcomes, based on the length and the level of violence, as well as incidents of reoccurrence. The study quantitatively examines 118 domestic conflicts between 1990 and 2014, utilizing the Political Instability Task Force and Religion and State datasets. The findings suggest that religious conflicts are likely to last longer than non-religious ones. However, the study reveals that religion has no strong significant influence on conflict termination as well as on the reoccurrence of conflicts and the violence level.