“Talk about terror in our back gardens”: an analysis of online comments about British foreign fighters in Syria

ABSTRACT

The phenomenon of foreign fighters has become a central issue to the ongoing conflict in Syria. This article explores how members of the public answer the question ‘Why do British citizens join the conflict in Syria’ on social media sites and in response to online news articles. Building upon research on everyday narratives of security and terrorism, we analyse 807 comments, and in doing so, we argue that online comments are important in producing the discursive environment for making sense of British foreign fighters and what should be done in response to them. We find that there is a tendency to view British foreign fighters as being purely motivated by religion, and there is also a belief that British foreign fighters should be responded to through exceptional measures. We discuss the implications of such perceptions, and we highlight how problematic misconceptions about Islam and Muslims are not just disseminated through elite and media discourse, but through everyday narratives published by members of the public online.

KEYWORDS:

• Syria
• foreign fighters
• Islamic State
• social media
• everyday narratives

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Richard Jackson and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, constructive criticism and excellent recommendations. We would also like to thank Listen and Learn Research for the opportunity to collect and analyse the data used in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raquel da Silva

Raquel da Silva was awarded a PhD by the University of Birmingham. Her education background is in Psychology and Justice Psychology, however her doctoral work covered different disciplines, including sociology, anthropology and International Relations. Her doctoral dissertation was the first study examining the interplay between the macro and micro narratives of political violence in Portugal. She has published on conflict transformation, counter-terrorism, and on methodological issues in the study of political violence and political narratives.

Rhys Crilley

Rhys Crilley is a teaching fellow in International Security at the University of Warwick. His research explores narratives and images of conflict on social media. He has published in Critical Studies on Security, Critical Military Studies and in an edited collection titled Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age (Routledge). In 2016, he was awarded the ISA International Communication Section’s Best Paper Award, and he is currently working towards a monograph based on his PhD research. He tweets at @rhyscrilley.