Islamic State’s quest for legitimacy: An analysis of IS media frames in Dabiq magazine

Abstract

This article focuses on the media frames of legitimization presented by the Islamist militant group the Islamic State (IS) in their English-language magazine Dabiq to justify their occupation and expansion in Iraq and Syria between June 2014 and July 2017. It argues that, similar to any other militant group, IS faced challenges in establishing, sustaining and projecting legitimacy of both the organization and its militant actions. Focusing on IS narrative frames of legitimacy in Dabiq, this article looks at how the group constructed frame hierarchies that built upon widely accepted higher-order meta-frames of Islamic belief and Westphalian devolution of state power, to lever support for lower-order frames that are of strategic advantage to IS. The author agues such narratives of legitimacy were vital in IS’s attempt to undermine the authority of the sovereign states they occupied, and were necessary to challenge the monopoly of state violence in order to legitimize its own use of strategic violence both inside the self-proclaimed caliphate and in its expansion.

The Legitimation Process of the Hilltop Youth

“…This is due primarily to the mass media's ability to convey messages to, and exert significant influence over the views of, a very wide audience. A player aspiring to legitimacy selects media tools tailored to the audiences it hopes to convince, taking into consideration that the more closely the player's ideology and political orientation match those of the target audience, the more likely it is that media narratives aligned with the player's goals will circulate (Schwarzenegger and Wagner 2018;Ubayasiri 2021). It is evident, therefore, that in order to maximize prospects for legitimacy, a player must act vigorously and in diverse ways to convince target audiences that its views are compatible with the existing social order.…”

The fog of words: Assessing the problematic relationship between strategic narratives, (master) frames and ideology

“…Colley (2017: 4) argues that such a perspective makes narrative ‘everything politicians say’, rather than specifically the stories they tell. Corman (2016) and Ubayasiri (2019) have addressed the same issue (i.e. the ISIS rhetorical attention to the town of Dabiq) while adopting different concepts: ‘master narrative’ for Corman (2016) and ‘narrative’ for Ubayasiri (2019).…”

“…Corman (2016) and Ubayasiri (2019) have addressed the same issue (i.e. the ISIS rhetorical attention to the town of Dabiq) while adopting different concepts: ‘master narrative’ for Corman (2016) and ‘narrative’ for Ubayasiri (2019). Halverson et al (2011) and Schmid (2014) define ‘master narratives’ as trans-historical narratives that are embedded in a particular culture.…”

Truth and lies in the Caliphate: The use of deception in Islamic State propaganda

“…While the data used here are similar to what has been used in a variety of studies of the Islamic State's goals, intentions, and appeal, it is also important to remember that this corpus of literature represents the Islamic State's perspective and should be analyzed in light of that understanding (Ingram, 2017;Milton, 2018b;Ubayasiri, 2019;Winter, 2015Winter, , 2018. In what follows, particularly given the focus on deception, the material is often compared with what other sources of information, ranging from newspapers to other academic works, have shown regarding the group's media efforts to offer additional points of reference regarding the accuracy of the topics discussed.…”