Mobilisation and violence in the new media ecology: the Dua Khalil Aswad and Camilia Shehata cases

Abstract

This article examines two cases in which political groups sought to harness the new media ecology to mobilise and justify acts of violence to public audiences and to supporters. In each case, a woman's suffering is presented and instrumentalised. However, the new media ecology offers an increasingly irregular economy of media modulation: digital footage may emerge today, in a year or never, and it may emerge anywhere to anyone. The cases analysed here allow for reflection on the tension between contingency and intentionality as that irregular economy brings uncertainty for the political actors involved. Dua Khalil Aswad, an Iraqi teenager of the Yazidi faith, was stoned to death by a Yazidi mob consisting of tens of men, mostly her relatives. One Yazidi uploaded a film of the killing. This led to violent reprisals against the Yazidis. Camilia Shehata is a young Coptic Egyptian who, after allegedly converting to Islam, was returned to her church with the help of Egyptian security forces and kept in hiding despite public protests. Extremists in Iraq and Egypt seized on the Shehata case to justify violence against Christians. In both instances, the irregular emergence of digital content and its remediation through these media ecologies enabled distributed agency in ways that empowered and confounded states, terrorists and citizens.

Keywords:

• terrorism
• violence
• media
• Internet
• Al-Qaeda
• new media ecology
• Iraq
• Egypt
• gender

Notes

1.The project, Legitimising the discourses of radicalisation: political violence in the new media ecology, was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (Award ref: RES-181-25-0041). See http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/nsc/projects/hoskins/ [Accessed 30 April 2012].

2.For a brief conceptual discussion, see Garton-Ash (2007); for more scholarly treatment, see Peters (2008). Our use of the term jihadist also emerges from the conference ‘Rethinking Jihad: ideas, politics and conflict in the Arab world & beyond’, 7–9 September 2009. Details are available at: http://www.casaw.ac.uk/conf/rj2009/about-the-conference.html [Accessed 30 April 2012].

3.See top 10 lists of Internet Haghana, archives of Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and periodical reviews of the International Institute for Counter Terrorism. Also, see reference to seniority of both fora in Washington Post article of April 2012 (Nakashima and Warrwick 2012).

4.See Evan Kohlmann's and Jarret Brachman's descriptions of Shamikh forum: http://cyberintelligence.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/jihadist-web-forum-knocked-off-internet/ [Accessed 30 April 2012].

5.On 3 June 2007, a spokesperson for the Kurdish Regional Government of Human Rights announced that between March and May, incidents involving violence against women in the Kurdistan region had increased by 18%. A senior police official in Erbil told UNAMI that the majority of unnatural deaths among women in Erbil were ‘honour’ killings and that at least one or two deaths were reported daily (UNAMI 2007b).

6.All translations from Arabic to English are carried out by Al-Lami.

7.Kurdish militia, now part of the official armed forces of Kurdistan.