Abstract
The way in which extremist media persuade individuals to commit violent acts has plagued researchers and policy makers alike. Near the beginning of Media Persuasion in the Islamic State, Aggarwal describes a time when exposure to ISIS propaganda elicited his own sympathetic reaction. The question of how the depiction of a handsome ISIS soldier and his potential subsequent death begin a chain of thoughts – the prolonged war in Iraq, the so-called collateral damage from US bombings, a life on the path of God surrounded by comrades free from the pressures of modernity – leads Aggarwal to a state of cognitive dissonance, and his first bitter taste of radicalization (p. 3). Aggarwal himself is, by his own admission, someone whom the Islamic State would delight in killing. Thus, one of his primary questions concerns how this propaganda could disrupt his own thoughts and emotions: why is the Islamic State’s media so seductive?
Aggarwal’s primary method for analysing ISIS’s use of media is one of mediated disorder. Mediated disorder attempts to disentangle group culture and individual psychology by investigating how militant groups use media to disrupt the thoughts and emotions of audiences while acting as an intermediary between individual and society in order to incite violence against others. This theory is placed within a more concrete method of discourse analysis through the use of adapted standardized variables from the Outline for Cultural Formulation (OCF) framework. Such variables included: shared meanings, practices and symbols that constitute group culture; psychological mechanisms of persuasion; and the social context of interpersonal relationships and institutions. Through this method, Aggarwal aims to explain how ISIS persuades individuals to commit violent acts without defaulting to individual traits of the listener, which he argues is a weakness of research in this field (p. 198).
While the title alludes to how the Islamic State utilizes media, this book delves quite a bit further back than that chronologically, covering a 15-year period from 1999 to 2014. This period can be reasonably split into before and after al-Zarqawi’s death in June 2006. Aggarwal aims to show how media from the phases of the Organization of Monotheism and Jihad (OMJ), Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the assembly of the Mujahideen Council (AMC) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) show the development of an increasingly cohesive identity in the Islamic State’s culture and psychology.
Aggarwal answers his questions through clearly structured and easy to follow chapters. Each chapter follows a different era and examines the different forms of media used in that period. For each piece of media, Aggarwal uses the same structure to analyse it. First he describes the content of the media, for texts he describes what is present and uses quotes, for video he breaks down sequences. Next he outlines what he finds to be the chain of logic behind the media – what is the piece trying to persuasively communicate to the reader? Each chapter ends with a discussion on how each piece of media fits into the overall manner in which the group mediates disorder.
One case study of particular interest concerns how ISIS utilizes videos featuring children to illustrate cultural diffusion through the processes of demographic swamping, intergroup competition and prestige-based selection (p. 144). In these videos, children imitate the in-group behaviours of adults. Boys are shown stocking trucks with supplies to be distributed to the public, learning in ISIS schools and presenting themselves as Cubs of the Caliphate. Girls are rarely shown, maybe one appears draped in an ISIS flag, reciting the Quran from memory with the aid of a missionary.
In another chapter, Aggarwal raises questions about the nature of the family inside the so-called caliphate. The three texts he examines extol jihad in very different ways for different members of the family. One insists that women must produce and dispatch men for battle, another shows fathers who prioritize their love for God over their love for their children. A third illustrates the path of fathers who, inspired by their martyred sons, choose to follow the path of jihad in later life. These texts analysed together help to disclose ISIS’s gender and parenting norms for families, through which it aims to create distance between individuals and their relatives. Aggarwal calls this process defamilarization, where detachment from biological relationships is encouraged: ‘mothers and fathers dispatch their adolescent children for attacks, and adolescents exhort siblings and fathers to follow their lead’ (p. 196). In line with this, the author argues for counter-media that promote refamiliarization which could help prevent fathers and sons from volunteering for suicide attacks.
While the final chapter directly relates the book’s findings to policymakers attempting to craft counter-messaging campaigns, this advice is relatively scarce. Aggarwal uses the lessons learnt from his study of mediated disorder to critique the public health model advocated by psychiatrists such as Kamaldeep Bhui and Stevan Weine. He argues that following this model has led to situations such as the UK’s NHS where it has been mandated that mental health professionals screen all patients for signs of militant activity and report such individuals to law enforcement. Instead, Aggarwal argues that public health screening could help to treat individuals, and not to aid law enforcement, in two areas: mediatized trauma and addiction. The book could have benefited from a further interrogation of these lessons for policy and practice. In a few places in the book, Aggarwal slips in some policy recommendations, such as the previously mentioned refamiliarization counter-media, but he avoids delving into the implications that his analysis could have on policy.
However, this could be seen as deliberate. Aggarwal is clearly against rushing into an international ‘best practices’ approach which dominated early deradicalization programmes despite a lack of outcomes evidence (p. 204). The key to understanding this lack of thorough policy advice comes from Aggarwal himself when he states that, while he supports a data-driven science, policy and practice of counter-messaging, he restricts his recommendations to his area of expertise: the field of cultural mental health (p. 201).
Aggarwal’s work proves to be an illuminating way to explain how ISIS disrupts thoughts and emotions through propaganda. Both through his use of mediated disorder theory and his careful analysis of phases leading up to the formation of the Islamic State, Aggarwal fills a gap in the literature which re-contextualizes how researchers can look at ISIS propaganda. The placement of mediated disorder theory placed within the OCF framework in particular provides a novel methodology for future research into this field. While this book is by its own admission a work of cultural mental health, its usefulness is not limited to psychologists. Researchers in any field who seek to understand ISIS’s substantial propaganda output, as well as those seeking an insight into their inner group dynamics, would find this book very useful.