Next week I will attend and speak at The Conference 2016 here in Malmö, one of the world’s leading conferences on media, technology, culture and business. It gathers practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines as well as academic researchers who are interested in the continuously evolving and rapidly developing field of the creative industry. I have been kindly invited to give a talk under a session of extremist communication, in which I will present extracts of the the scope of narratives within ISIS messaging and propaganda. I will go beyond the media headlines of brutality and gruesome beheadings and tell a story about how completely opposite rhetorical appeals were implemented in the beginning of ISIS expansion and how they managed to get a historical influx of foreign fighters to the self-declared caliphate.
My hope is to show how ISIS ideological and mediated strategies differ from earlier and similar jihadist groups (especially AQI from which it derives) but also attempt to discuss how the current geographical setbacks for ISIS are reflected in their media strategies and shows a change of focus as the loss of important/strategic cities in the region is increasing.
I deeply look forward to take part of The Conference and grateful to be able to convey my insights about ISIS – an organisation with an extreme and sophisticated propaganda and ideology that I have devoted several years to in order to comprehend.