Intentional and Performative Persuasion: The Linguistic Basis for Criminalizing the (Direct and Indirect) Encouragement of Terrorism

Article 5 of the Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism requires member states to criminalise “public provocation to commit a terrorist offence”. In the U.K., the realisation of this obligation is found in the “Encouragement of terrorism” offence contained in section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006. As well as fulfilling the U.K.’s treaty obligation, this offence was intended to stop the spread of violent extremist ideology. Although the compatibility of this offence with the right to freedom of expression enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights has been queried, both the domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights have held that it complies with Article 10’s demands. So, instead of taking Article 10 as its starting point, this article draws instead on work from the field of linguistics: namely, speech act theory (SAT). By using insights from SAT, and by examining some of the linguistic strategies that may be used to encourage acts of terrorism, the article seeks to advance the legal understanding of the concept of encouragement. In particular, the article draws out two features of encouragement that have important implications for the appropriate boundaries of the encouragement of terrorism offence - encouragement is intentional and it is performative - and argues that, as currently drafted, the offence does not reflect the nature of encouragement as an intentional activity. The article concludes by drawing out from its analysis a series of proposed amendments that together address the rights-based concerns about the offence whilst maintaining its effectiveness as a counterterrorism tool

Visual Jihad: Constructing the “Good Muslim” in Online Jihadist Magazines

Images are known to have important effects on human perception and persuasion. Jihadist groups are also known to make strategic use of emotive imagery and symbolism for persuasive ends. Yet until recently studies of the online magazines published by violent jihadist groups largely focused on their textual, not their image, content and, whilst the image content of these magazines is now the subject of a burgeoning number of studies, few of these compare the images used by different groups. This article accordingly offers a cross-group comparison, examining the image content of a total of 39 issues of five online magazines published by four different jihadist groups. Starting with a content analysis, it shows that the images’ most common focus is non-leader jihadis. Using a news values analysis, it then shows how these images of non-leader jihadis are used to visually construct the identity of a ‘good Muslim’. This construct is characterised by three traits, each corresponding to a different news value: fulfilled (personalisation); active (consonance); and, respected (prominence). Moreover, these traits are intertwined: fulfilment comes from responding actively to the call to violent jihad, which in turn promises respect. The article concludes by highlighting some subtle differences between how the news values of personalisation, consonance and prominence are realised in the different magazines, and by discussing the implications of the ‘good Muslim’ construct for efforts to develop counter-messages

‘So is your mom as cute as you?’: Examining patterns of language use in online sexual grooming of children

Linguistic research into online grooming is scarce despite both the communicative essence of this form of online child sexual abuse and a substantial body of literature into it across other Social Sciences. Most of this literature has examined small data sets via qualitative methods, primarily thematic analysis; the exception being a couple of studies that have used automated software (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count - LIWC) that operates at a single-word level. This study evaluates the contribution that a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach can make to this body of literature, with a focus on online groomers’ language. The corpus consists of >600 grooming chat logs taken from the Perverted Justice Foundation archive, from which the groomers’ language was extracted (c. 3.3 million words). Lexical dispersion (DPNorm), collocation and concordance analyses were conducted. The corpus was also run through LIWC. Our analysis shows that LIWC may not be the most efficient software to analyse online grooming language due to a lack of general language comparison scores, the non-transparency of some of its analytic variables and a focus on de-contextualised words. Comparatively, CADS methods can shed light upon online groomers’ strategic use of language. They can also reveal the complex and nuanced ways in which discourse features such as (im)explicitness and interpersonal (in)directness operate alongside these strategies

Othering the West in the online Jihadist propaganda magazines Inspire and Dabiq

This paper examines how the jihadist terrorist groups Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State discursively construct ‘the West’ as an alien, aberrant ‘other’ in their respective online propaganda magazines Inspire and Dabiq over a 5 year period (2010-2015). The analysis integrates insights from the field of Terrorism Studies into a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies approach, working centrally with the notions of othering and conventionalised impoliteness. Our findings reveal not only that othering is a key discursive process in the groups’ online propaganda machinery but that it is discursively realised via homogenisation, suppression (stereotyping) and pejoration strategies. The latter are further examined via the notion of conventional impoliteness. Pointed criticism emerges as the most frequent conventionalised impoliteness strategy in both magazines. Threats, condescensions and exclusion strategies are also saliently used, albeit with different relative frequencies within each magazine. The findings show the value of Discourse Analysis to research into (jihadist) terrorism, including the possibility of drawing upon its findings to develop tailored counter-messages to those advanced by (jihadist) terrorist groups

Investigating Reclaim Australia and Britain First’s Use of Social Media: Developing a New Model of Imagined Political Communities Online

Against a backdrop of widespread concern regarding the extreme right’s increasing use of social media and using a combination of quantitative and qualitative linguistic techniques, this paper reports the results of the first systematic analysis of how two extreme right groups (Britain First and Reclaim Australia) construct themselves as sui generis ‘imagined political communities’ on social media (Facebook and Twitter). Analysis of a circa 5-million-word dataset reveals that both groups strategically mobilise a number of topical news events (relative to their country) and systematically denigrate (‘other’) immigrants and Muslims. It also reveals that Reclaim Australia favours more aggressive stances than Britain First towards targeted out-groups. The relative salience and inter-relations between the features that form these groups’ imagined political communities differ significantly from those proposed by pre-digital era notions of imagined political communities. Thus, this study proposes a new model of social—media based imagined political communities for extreme right groups in which developing boundaries against perceived threats posed by othered groups (Muslims and immigrants) emerges as the main pillar