This article examines the role of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria's (ISIS's) beheading videos in the United Kingdom and the United States. These videos are highly illustrative demonstrations of the importance of visual imagery and visual media in contemporary warfare. By functioning as evidence in a political discourse constituting ISIS as an imminent, exceptional threat to the West, the videos have played an important role in the re‐framing of the conflict in Iraq and Syria from a humanitarian crisis requiring a humanitarian response to a national security issue requiring a military response and intensified counterterrorism efforts. However, this article seeks to problematize the role and status of ISIS's beheadings in American and British security discourses by highlighting the depoliticizing aspects of reducing a complicated conflict to a fragmented visual icon. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for further attention to how the visibility of war, and the constitution of boundaries between which acts of violence are rendered visible and which are not, shape the political terrain in which decisions about war and peace are produced and legitimized.

The militant group known as the Islamic State has become notorious for its public displays of violence. Through slick high-definition videos showing beheadings, immolations and other forms of choreographed executions, the Islamic State has repeatedly captured the imagination of a global public and provoked vehement reactions. This article examines the Islamic State’s public displays of violence. Contrary to the public constitution of the Islamic State’s violence as an exceptional evil, the article argues that the group’s staging of killings and mutilations is not an unprecedented phenomenon, but a contemporary version of a distinct type of political violence that has been mobilized by various political agents throughout centuries. However, what is new and significant about the Islamic State’s choreographed executions is the public visibility of the acts and the global spectacle that the group has created. Thus, if the Islamic State is introducing a new dynamic in global politics, it is not a new form of violence or brutality, but rather a transformation of how spectacles of violence unfold on the global stage. Subsequently, the article highlights three dimensions of the Islamic State’s public displays of violence that have facilitated the creation of the global spectacle: the Islamic State’s technological skills and professional use of media ( technology); the Islamic State’s mobilization of acts of violence that transgress prevailing sensibilities ( transgression); and the violent acts’ function as not only a form of terror, but also an integral element of a state project and a visual manifestation of an alternative political order ( politics).

Introduction