Legitimising the discourses of radicalisation: political violence in the new media ecology

NEW PROJECT WEBSITE:  http://www.newmediaecology.net/radicalisation/index.html

 

In the post-9/11 environment of media and conflict, the spread of the ideas and practices of 'radicalisation' and terrorism appear to have been enabled and accelerated through advances in Internet content and practices: so-called 'Web 2.0’ (a wide range of ‘second generation’ services available on the Web to which users can contribute as easily as they can consume).

This research adopts an innovative 'new media ecology' approach to illuminate how such views and acts are 'legitimated' and contested. The new media ecology we identify as the uneven although often immediate connectivity and interpenetration of people, events, medias (and particularly images) in and through which modern conflict is reflexively fought, played out, and experienced. In this way our research is necessarily integrated through:

  1. content analysis of the images, sounds and words (in articles, discussions, and videos) used by those who claim to hold radical views and who wish to legitimise or promote terrorist acts;
  2. how the acts themselves and explanations for them on the web are 'picked up' and represented in mainstream television news media, through journalistic and editorial uses of words, phrases, graphics, images, videos and so on;
  3. how understandings and misunderstandings of this term 'radicalisation' are shaped via news reporting and representations, tested through interviews and focus group analysis with news publics in the UK and through international comparisons.

What is 'new', if anything, about these 'radicalising' discourses, what forms of knowledge are used to legitimate jihadist 'political' acts of violence and terror, and what is the role of the medias 'new' and traditional in amplifying and/or containing these claims and acts?

This research emerges out of a previous New Security Challenges’ Programme project entitled 'Shifting Securities: News Cultures Before and Beyond the 2003 Iraq War' (www.mediatingsecurity.com). It identified a 'growing securitisation of everyday life' in Britain where there is a great deal of mistrust and suspicion between policymakers, journalists, and citizens/news audiences, amplified through media coverage of security issues and events.