Beyond Conventional Approaches to Political Violence: ISIS Beheadings as Performances (original) (raw)
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Off With Their Heads: The Islamic State and Civilian Beheadings
Journal of Terrorism Research, 2015
This article evaluates the use of beheadings by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. We place beheadings in a broader historical context and draw from academic research in terrorism studies and the social sciences to explain why the Islamic State has adopted such brutal tactics. We outline the strategic logic of beheading and evaluate explanations related to symbolic politics, culture, and organizational dynamics. We conclude with a discussion about the future of Islamic State violence.
Shock and Awe: Performativity, Machismo and ISIS
Looking at the ISIS beheadings through the analytical lens of performativity opens up insights concerning the significance of media discourse between the US/UK and ISIS, as well as interrelated competition regarding ideas of masculinity and sexual superiority. By considering the beheadings as performed violence, taking into account Juris" ideas about performativity in particular, it is understood that they are instances of violence in which their perpetrators communicate and "seek to produce social transformation by staging symbolic rituals of confrontation."[i] This understanding of performed violence is in line Jabri"s understanding of violence as a means of political communication, resulting from its social and cultural context[ii], and Butler"s ideas about performativity in relation to sexual identity, or gender as performed and communicated through violence, media and other means. [iii][iv] The ISIS beheadings are part of a wider war of images,[v] furthermore, as well as war of masculinities [vi], and can be better understood as part of a tit-for-tat struggle between ISIS and the UK/US, using media to communicate competitive ideas of sexual superiority. By considering the ISIS beheadings through media and sexual discourse, their meaning and even causeincluding the role of the US and UK in provoking such public political violencecan be better understood.
Jihadi Beheading Videos and their Non-Jihadi Echoes
Perspectives on Terrorism, 2018
In recent years, the Islamic State terror organization has become notorious for its evil brutality. The brutal nature of its propaganda (distributed mostly online) inspires Jihadi sympathizers around the world, encouraging them to use violence against " the enemies of Islam ". This form of violent behavior has also been adopted and imitated by others – including non-Muslim individuals and groups – regardless of their geographic location, worldview, religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Drawing from numerous examples, this article illustrates two processes: first, the " mainstreaming " of beheadings among Jihadists, and second, the imitation of this method (decapitation) by individuals motivated by other kinds of extremism.
Theatres of blood: performative violence in iraq
absTraCT This article examines much of the violence of the past two decades in Iraq through the prism of performative politics. This draws attention to its spectacular nature, its repertoires and aesthetics, where blood becomes the common referent in a theatre of state power and resistance. Beyond the spectacle, however, violence is performative in that it possesses causal power. Violence has shaped the ways in which conflicts have been understood and organized, reproducing and reinforcing particular identities, institutions and attitudes in Iraq. Performative violence became a spectacle of horror and, through that horror a technology for the demarcation of whole categories of Iraqi citizen whose blood Islamic State and others licensed themselves to shed. Both nascent state forces and those resisting them, as well the foreign powers active in the Iraqi theatre, had every interest in making manifest their competence and their potential in the use of violence. Regardless of the identity of the parties involved, or the ends they were pursuing, violence has thus become a key technology of power. To perform it has been to assert the right to power in the political landscape of Iraq. In the summer of 2016, Iraqi government forces, assisted by state licensed militias and their foreign allies succeeded in recapturing the town of Fallujah and securing Ramadi after a two year occupation by the armed forces of Islamic State (IS). Meanwhile, Kurdish peshmerga, operating with Yezidi armed units and assisted by United States and British military advisers, as well as by United States and British air forces, had been gradually re-establishing their control Keywords political violence performative politics state building resistance Islamic State Iraqi security forces
"Cubs of the Caliphate": ISIS's Spectacle of Violence
Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Criminology, 2019
Abstract Throughout history and across different cultures, militant groups have used children as spies, informants, soldiers and for various other propaganda purposes. (Honwana 2011) Not much has changed with the passage of time. The use of children by ISIS is a modern-day continuation of these trends. However, what sets ISIS apart from other terrorist groups (e.g. the Taliban, Boko Haram, Al Shabab, and Al Qaeda) is the fact that ISIS has not only been training children at a large scale, but has also used children extensively for its propaganda campaign. This paper analyses ISIS videos featuring children through the analytical framework of the "spectacle of violence" literature and illustrates that depiction of children as actors and performers of ultra-violence in a theatrical scene, is a visual rhetoric of humiliation and a counter-narrative that juxtaposes the inversion of roles of children and adults.
Re-enacting Violence: Contesting Public Spheres with Appropriations of IS Execution Videos
Jihadi Audiovisuality and its Entanglements: Meanings, Aesthetics, Appropriations, 2020
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The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (“ISIS”) continues to generate headlines as it seeks to further entrench a self-proclaimed caliphate across the Levant. This vision is expansionist, and it is prosecuted through military conquest. Throughout its seized territory, ISIS has instituted what it claims to be Islamic rules of governance. The enforcement of Islamic penal law has led to the implementation of controversial punishments ranging from stoning to death of adulteress women to summary executions of apostate soldiers to amputations of guilty thieves to crucifixions for crimes that include sorcery and blasphemy. In a relatively recent publication following the international uproar over the taped beheading of American journalist James Foley, an ISIS-affiliated religious figurehead, Sheik Husayn ibn Mahmud, released an eight-page polemic entitled “The Question of Beheadings”. The latter article constitutes a sustained response to the ensuing avalanche of criticism directed against ISIS, the crux of which asserted that the punishment of beheading—the taking of a sharp knife to the neck—has no religious basis. Seeking to counter this claim, Sheik Mahmud engages the text of the Qu’ran and hadiths (collections of deeds and saying attributed to Prophet Muhammad, 570-632 AD), as well as appealing to exegetical accounts of classical Muslim scholars (e.g., ibn Kathir, al-Suyuti, al-Qurtubi, al-Zamakshari etc.) to buttress his carefully crafted legal argument, ultimately finding sufficient support for the religious legitimacy of beheadings. The argument frames the act of beheading as being not only the long-standing practice of the Prophet Muhammad, his companions and successors throughout history, but also as a divinely mandated command. This essay examines the crafting of a narrative from the legitimizing sources (i.e., the Qur’an and hadith).
Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time: ISIS Executions, Visual Rhetoric and Sovereign Power
The ISIS videos staging the executions of James Foley and Steven Sotloff are usually understood as devices to deter, recruit, and "sow terror." Left unanswered are questions about how these videos work; to whom they are addressed; and what about them can so continuously bring new audiences into existence. The evident durability of ISIS despite the imminent defeat of its state, coupled with the political impact of these particular videos, make these questions unusually urgent. Complete answers require analysis of the most understudied aspect of the videos that also happens to be vastly understudied in US political science: the visual mode of the violence. Approaching these videos as visual texts in need of close reading shows that they are, among other things, enactments of "retaliatory humiliation" (defined by Islamists) that perform and produce an inversion of power in two registers. It symbolically converts the public abjection of Foley and Sotloff by the Islamist executioner into an enactment of ISIS' invincibility and a demonstration of American impotence. It also aims to transpose the roles between the US, symbolically refigured as mass terrorist, failed sovereign, and rogue state, and ISIS, now repositioned as legitimate, invincible sovereign. Such rhetorical practices seek to actually constitute their audiences through the very visual and visceral power of their address. The affective power of this address is then extended and intensified by the temporality that conditions it-what I call digital time. Digital time has rendered increasingly rare ordinary moments of pause between rapid and repetitive cycles of reception and reaction-moments necessary for even a small measure of distance. The result is a sensibility, long in gestation but especially of this time, habituated to thinking less and feeling more, to quick response over deliberative action.
Title: ISIL's Execution Videos: Agenda-Setting and Terrorism in the Digital Age
This article offers a bottom-up understanding of the global media's role in global political communication from the perspective of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This empirical analysis provides content and visual analysis of sixty-two videos of executions produced by ISIL in the year following its establishment as an 'Islamic State'. Through examination of the videos as major media production efforts by ISIL, this research identifies how an emergent terrorist group views itself and communicates its message, setting a political agenda and strategic outlook that rely upon the global media to be transmitted and accessed. Data analysis suggests a threefold strategy directed towards: 1.) Legitimization of the need for and, ipso facto, the establishment of a 'state' entity; 2.) Intimidation of religious and political in-group and out-groups and; 3.) Propagation of its message to increase recruitment, funding, and further its legitimization and intimidation efforts. Moreover, this analysis contextualizes the unique duality of ISIL's media strategy: first, its purpose is to spread a political message aimed at both local and global, in-group and out-group consumption through audience segmentation. ISIL's claim to state legitimacy is done through the mimicry of capital punishment as a function of state and political power. Second, ISIL's use and production of graphic violence seeks to induce terror in both local and global audiences. Finally, this article discusses ISIL's "media battle;" its overall media strategy, as well as the intertwined political and religious agenda it seeks to set and spread in the digital media age.
Terror & Performance: Asymmetric Warfare, Martyrdom, & Necropolitics
Terrorism is not just an act of warfare, it is one which assumes an audience and is considered by some as a form of performance art. Terrorist organizations such as Daesh, Hamas, al-Qaida and Hezbollah make use of spectacles and extreme performances in order to accomplish their aims. Martyr videos, suicide bombing coverage, speeches by heads of state, activist recordings, satellite images on smartphones, and drone footage all take part in this ideological ‘war on terror’. This is a symptom of what Baudrillard calls the ‘Fourth World War’, a war in which “what is at stake is globalization itself”. Firstly, Achille Mbembe’s theoretical framework on race and colonization will be used to outline contemporary necropolitics, and showcase how race, terrorism and death are intertwined. Secondly, I will analyze how terrorist attacks hijack death as ‘sacrifice’. Thirdly, I will outline the aesthetics of violence, and the performativity of terror, in order to showcase how violence and terror are used to ‘make meaning’. Fourthly, I will illustrate the performativity of terrorism, showcasing how, viewed through the lens of ‘performance art’, military action is inefficient as a counter-terrorism effort.