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Jihadi Violence – A study of al-Qaeda‘s media

Andreas Armborst (Germany)

Ph.D. Project

Jihadi militancy is puzzling for many reasons. It sometimes brings about strategic advances, while on other occasions it appears to be overly ideology-driven and ill-considered. The purposes of jihadi violence are indeed versatile and reach from ideologically abstract to tactically precise. One of the often-stated questions about jihadism and al-Qaeda (AQ) is whether its leaders are religious fanatics devoid of all common sense or whether they are politically rational and power-hungry actors who make strategic use of religion. This study of the jihadi ideology affirms both assumptions.

It analyses communiqués of al-Qaeda and affiliated groups with focus on the question: What does jihadi media says about motivation, justification, adequacy and expected outcome of violent action? The method of explorative and relational content analysis (using the software MAXQDA) is used to identify and map the different narratives, themes and issues of 31 statements of three al-Qaeda leaders (Usama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Yahya al-Libi). The results show that al-Qaida has created a complex worldview that touches upon a plethora of theological and political issues.

The blending of theological and political argument is salient throughout the jihadi media. Political claims and grievances are skillfully backed up by journalistic evidence, whereas theological arguments are complemented by legal references to Quran and Sunna. In addition, the jihadi leaders provide doctrines and strategies describing how the use of force can defend Islam against its perceived three existential threads – the global conflict, apostasy, and secular governance. Theological and strategic considerations converge in al-Qaeda’s rationale for violence.

The ideological implications of jihadism materialized in Iraq after the US invasion in March 2003. Content analysis of claims of responsibilities issued by jihadi groups in Iraq indicates that there is ideological convergence, divergence and innovation to the salafi-jihadi doctrine of AQ central.

In addition to the empirical findings, the study seeks to gain three other benefits for researching political violence and terrorism: First, it introduces the terms preference and indifference from economic theory to describe the choice of targets in political violence and terrorism. Second, it compiles some of the most important academic writings about the jihadi movement into a digest of jihadism that standardizes terminology and gives a brief and comprehensive overview of disparate information; third, the study develops a methodological approach to systematically map the content of a given ideology and to monitor its developments.

This method applies five hierarchical categories (discourse, frames, narratives, themes, and issues) to distinguish between more abstract and more substantive content of the jihadi statements. The analyst pools text passages dealing with a similar topic, gives it an illustrative description (e.g. corruption in the gulf states) and then situates the topic within the hierarchical structure of other content. For example: corruption is one end of the branch socio-political diagnosis (diagnostic frame); more specifically it belongs to the narrative about apostasy & governmental malpractice which further subdivides into different themes, one of which is labeled grievances. Corruption is one issue among different grievances. All in all the study identifies 92 different frames, narratives, themes, and issues in the ideology of the al-Qaeda central. The claims of responsibilities from al-Qaeda in Iraq contain additional topics. The method of the study proposes two heuristics to classify the content of a given ideology: first to use as few categories as possible and as much as necessary to adequately represent all of the content; and second, to maximize the internal homogeneity and the external heterogeneity of the content within each category. The study outlines and applies a standardized methodological framework to trace and map developments in Islamist and jihadi ideology.

Publications

(selection)
  • Armborst, Andreas: Jihadi Journalism. In: Aurélio, D. P. / Proença, J. T. (ed(s).): Terrorism: Politics, Religion, Literature. Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, p. 115 - 128.
  • Armborst, Andreas: Modelling terrorism and political violence. In: International Relations, 2010, issue/volume 24/4, p. 414 - 432.
  • Armborst, Andreas: Jihadism, terrorism and the state. In: Armborst, A., Jensen, D. (Eds.): Retaliation, Mediation and Punishment. edition iuscrim, forschung aktuell – research in brief, no. 42. Freiburg i. Br. 2010, p. 5-13.
  • Armborst, Andreas: A profile of Religious Fundamentalism and Terrorist Activism. In: Defence Against Terrorism Review, 2009, Issue⁄Volume 2/1, p. 51 - 71.

Further information