Description
In recent years there has been a proliferation of research into the Islamic State group; from scrutiny of its communications strategy, to analyses of media and political constructions of the threat. This paper offers an interdisciplinary contribution to the literature, and the wider media-state-terrorism relationship more generally, by investigating the interplay between the group’s self-representations and their re-imagination by Western politicians and media. It seeks to investigate which frames are produced by each group, and how they interact and coordinate with one another across space and time. The paper combines scholarship on “framing” (Entman 2004) and “dialogical networks” (Leudar & Nekvapil 2022), and shows how each actor is connected interactively, thematically, and argumentatively, with terrorists and politicians largely adopting the same framing strategies. Despite mobilising the same frames, however, the paper also shows how they are transformed into “reverse mirror images of one another”, with each group attempting to systematically invert the meaning of each other’s frames in line with their social and religious identities (after Toltz et al 2021). In so doing, the paper will generate much-needed empirical and conceptual insight into the various shifts, transformations and interactions that take place between terrorists, politicians, and journalists in today’s evolving and multi-layered communications environment.