Description
Images as narrative: Analysing how the Islamic State manipulates images for storytelling purposes
Despite IR’s ‘aesthetic turn’, approaches for analysing political images in a systematic and rigorous manner way remains a significant yet largely unexplored methodological challenge. This paper seeks to address this gap by proposing how the photographs employed in the Islamic State’s propaganda may be ‘read’ narratively – that is as artifacts evocative of implicit, emergent stories in the minds of those that consume them. Whilst the presence of symbols, motifs, or representations of societal or cultural meanings are often noted in reference to extremist propaganda, the images contained also inherently trigger imagination; in any given image individuals naturally see a succession of incidents or events that have led up to it, just as they envision those that follow it. Given that extremists seek not only to persuade but also to inspire – something that necessarily rests on the capacity to imagine – it is crucial to understand how their images are manipulated to shape how they may be read. The methodology proposed in this paper highlights the ‘texture and techniques’ by which the Islamic State carefully composes, frames and edits images to tell certain stories.
