Textual Analysis of Extremist Propaganda and Counter- Narrative: a quanti-quali investigation

Analyse textuelle de la propagande extrémiste et du contre-discours : une étude quanti-qualitative

Laura Ascone (1)

1 AGORA - Laboratoire AGORA

This paper investigates the rhetorical strategies of jihadist propaganda and counter-narrative in English and French. Since jihadist propaganda aims at both persuading the Islamic State's sympathisers and threatening its enemies, attention was focused on the way threat and persuasion are verbalised. As far as jihadist propaganda is concerned, the study was conducted on the Islamic State's two official online magazines: Dabiq, published in English, and Dar al-Islam, published in French. As for the counter-narrative, the corpus was composed of the articles published on the main English and French governmental websites. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches allowed to examine the general characteristics as well as the specificities of both jihadist propaganda and counter-narrative. The software Tropes was used to analyse the corpora from a semantic-pragmatic perspective. The results' statistical validity was then verified and synthesised with the softwares Iramuteq and R. This study revealed that the rhetorical strategies varied between both jihadist propaganda and counter-narrative, and French and English.

Mots clés: jihadist propaganda; counter-narrative; discourse analysis; threat; persuasion

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Linguistique

Laura Ascone. Textual Analysis of Extremist Propaganda and Counter- Narrative: a quanti-quali investigation. JADT, Jun 2018, Rome, Italy. ⟨hal-02317752⟩