Differentiating Act from Ideology: Evidence from Messages For and Against Violent Extremism

Abstract

Although researchers know a great deal about persuasive messages that encourage terrorism, they know far less about persuasive messages that denounce terrorism and little about how these two sides come together. We propose a conceptualization that distinguishes a message’s support for an act from its support for the ideology underlying an act. Our prediction is tested using corpus‐linguistic analysis of 250 counter‐extremist messages written by Muslims and U.K. officials and a comparison set of 250 Muslim extremist messages. Consistent with our prediction, Muslim extremist and Muslim counter‐messages show disagreement on terrorist actions but agreement in ideological aspects, while U.K. officials’ counter‐messages show disagreement with both Muslim extremists’ acts and ideology. Our findings suggest that counter‐messages should not be viewed as a homogenous group and that being against violent extremism does not necessarily equate to having positive perceptions of Western values.

Crisis negotiation: from suicide to terrorism intervention

“…For example, by communicating about what can be seen rather than inferring the likely feelings of the perpetrator, Dick is careful to avoid making assumptions or suggesting a degree of familiarity that may cause conflict (Arkowitz, Westra, & Miller, 2008). This is consistent with a wider observation in terrorism research, which is that engagement with those promoting violence is more successful when focused on the act rather than on the underpinning ideology or motivation (Prentice, Rayson, Taylor, & Giebels, 2012). A negotiator can propose alternative, peaceful ways of accomplishing a goal without challenging the perpetrator's underlying belief system.…”

“…Note that one factor that is not amongst these differences is a reference to Islam and Nationalism. Despite these concepts often being the focus of counter-terrorism efforts (Prentice et al, 2012), these terms are not typically associated with violent political engagement. Based on this kind of analysis, Dechesne proposes Terrorism and Crisis Negotiation 25 a metric-a T-value-that serves to predict the extent to which the behaviors of a terrorist group are likely to be centered on violence or aggressive dialogue.…”

A corpus-driven comparison of English and French Islamist extremist texts

“…Conoscenti (2016), for example, examines collocates in a corpus of Dabiq articles in order to identify the different types of enemies mentioned in the texts. Also, Prentice and colleagues (Prentice et al, 2011(Prentice et al, , 2012 apply the online tool Wmatrix (which automatically assigns semantic codes to words in the corpus, see Rayson, 2009) to several different datasets of extremist texts. Their 2011 study examines 50 extremist texts which advocated violence in relation to the Gaza conflict, in order to identify persuasive strategies in two time periods.…”

High‐Stakes Conflicts and the Link between Theory and Practice: Celebrating the Work of Ellen Giebels

“…Another noteworthy aspect of Ellen's work is the use of a wide range of research and data collection methods. They range from content analyzing audio recordings of hostage negotiations (Giebels & Taylor, ), realistic simulations of police negotiations (Giebels et al., ), semantic analyses of extremist and counter‐extremist violence messages (Prentice, Taylor, Rayson, & Giebels, ), content analyses of paper files of neighborhood conflict mediators (Ufkes, Giebels, et al., , Ufkes, Otten, et al. ), and physiological electrodermal activity measures (EDA: a measure of skin conductance as an indicator for arousal) during deceptive attempts when being interview by a computer avatar (Ströfer, Ufkes, Bruijnes, Giebels, & Noordzij, ).…”