Radicalisation and Media ─ Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology

This book examines the circulation and effects of radical discourse by analysing the role of mass media coverage in promoting or hindering radicalisation and acts of political violence.

There is a new environment of conflict in the post-9/11 age, in which there appears to be emerging threats to security and stability in the shape of individuals and groups holding or espousing radical views about religion, ideology, often represented in the media as oppositional to Western values. This book asks what, if anything is new about these radicalising discourses, how and why they relate to political acts of violence and terror, and what the role of the mass media is in promoting or hindering them.

This includes exploring how the acts themselves and explanations for them on the web are picked up and represented in mainstream television news media or Big Media, through the journalistic and editorial uses of words, phrases, graphics, images, and videos. It analyses how interpretations of the term 'radicalisation' are shaped by news representations through investigating audience responses, understandings and misunderstandings. Transnational in scope, this book seeks to contribute to an understanding of the connectivity and relationships that make up the new media ecology, especially those that appear to transcend the local and the global, accelerate the dissemination of radicalising discourses, and amplify media/public fears of political violence.

This book will be of interest to students of security studies, media studies, terrorism studies, political science and sociology.

Akil N. Awan is a Lecturer in Contemporary Islam and the current RCUK Fellow in the ‘Contemporary History of Faith, Power and Terror’ in the Departments of History at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor of Global Security in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow.

Ben O’Loughlin is Reader in International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London and Associate Director of the New Political Communication Unit.