Understanding what makes terrorist groups’ propaganda effective: an integrative complexity analysis of ISIL and Al Qaeda

ABSTRACT

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) became an increasingly powerful terrorist organisation in a relatively short period of time, drawing more recruits than its former affiliate, Al Qaeda. Many have attributed ISIL’s successful expansion in part to its extensive propaganda platform. But what causes terrorist groups to be effective in their communication to the public? To investigate, we examined one aspect of terrorists’ rhetoric: Integrative complexity. In particular, this historical examination provides a broad integrative complexity analysis of public statements released by key members of ISIL and Al Qaeda over a 10-year period when ISIL was rapidly growing as a terrorist entity (2004–2014). Findings revealed that (a) ISIL demonstrated less complexity overall than Al Qaeda (p < .001) and (b) ISIL became increasingly less complex over this focal time period (p < .001), while Al Qaeda’s complexity remained comparatively stable (p = .69). Taken together, these data suggest that as ISIL grew in size and strength between 2004 and 2014 – surpassing Al Qaeda on multiple domains such as recruitment, monetary resources, territorial control, and arms power – it simultaneously became less complex in its communication to the public.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• propaganda
• integrative complexity
• ISIL
• Al Qaeda

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Shannon C. Houck http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8967-9317

Notes

1. At the centre of much confusion and controversy are the various names for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and their evolution over time. While we recognise the nuanced complexity around the naming of the group, for the sake of simplifying presentation, in the present paper, we refer to the group as ISIL – the name used by both the United Nations and the Obama administration (Tharoor, 2014).

2. The Global Terrorism Research Project website is continually updated. As such, we discovered that one ISIL statement was added to the site after data collection was completed for the current paper. Given the large data set this paper already utilises, the ever-changing nature of the index in the resource we relied on for data collection, and the very limited data post-2014 (e.g. only one publicly accessible ISIL statement), we determined 2014 to be a sensible stopping point for data collection for this analysis.

3. Because the focus of our paper is on the comparison between ISIL and Al Qaeda, we opted to constrain analyses of Al Qaeda’s statements to only time frames that occurred during the general period (2004–2014) when scored ISIL documents were available. This controls more directly for factors that might be specific to different historical time frames. However, it does remove quite a bit of data, as Al Qaeda had collected data that occurred before 2004. Thus, we also performed all key analyses presented below while using a sample that included all collected documents prior to 2004 for Al Qaeda. Those analyses largely mirrored the analyses presented below, both descriptively and inferentially; therefore, we discuss the issue no further.