Challenging the Jihadi Narrative: Interviews of French Prisoners Held in Syria
Résumé
Narratives as discursive constructions contribute to identity assignment, and, by doing so, they become objects of negotiation within situated discourses. In this paper, we study the discourse of three French Jihadi prisoners when interviewed by a journalist for the national channel France 2. Alleged radicals arrested and taken prisoners in Syria, they all aspire to return to France and have requested to be repatriated. We show that the I-We-They pragmatic stances that forge the very essence of the Jihadi narrative are reinvested and redefined by the interviewees, who seek to avoid the “stigma” of radicality and thus create an enunciative posture that we will designate as “a-radical”. The posture of “aradicality” reconfigures the existing interpretative schemas that oscillate between radicalization versus de-radicalization or between radicalization versus radicalism. By adopting an aradical enunciative posture, interviewees extricate themselves from this dichotomy and lay down the foundations of their persuasion strategy.