Radical War by Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins

Author:Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd
Published: 2022-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

5

THE WEAPONISED ARCHIVE

Building an Islamic state that ‘is better at taking care of its citizens’ demands good record-keeping (Sheikh 2016). As a proto-state, IS understood this and put effort into maintaining its archives. If IS had ignored this aspect of state-making, then its leaders would have been unable to properly manage resources or maintain law and order. Good record-keeping ensured appropriate taxes could be collected fairly, in a timely manner and in a way that stood a chance of gaining the population’s allegiance. This was important because taxes made it possible to pay soldiers who in turn could help to expand and defend IS. The larger the state became, the more complicated governance became, and the more things needed to be coordinated in writing.

Maintaining good records and taking a highly structured approach to administration creates a sense in which IS had permanence. Records meant history, and history is where legacies are built. With its borders under threat and its history on the verge of being rewritten by its conquerors, IS’s media operators turned to the new war ecology to avoid extinction.1 They also promote legacy messages that remind participants about the positive world that IS was trying to bring about for the Muslim community. ‘Archivist amplifiers’ like the Upload Knights (Fursan al-Rafa in Arabic) find ways to slip beheading videos and IS leadership speeches on to YouTube.2 Here the goal is to keep a sense of nostalgia for what was the possibility of a caliphate3 to ensure that memories of what once was can be kept alive in the minds of those who have been motivated or who might be motivated to help rebuild IS at some point in the future. In this respect, IS propaganda wasn’t just about the immediate demands to motivate its followers, defend IS from counterpropaganda or even to intimidate its enemies (Ingram, Whiteside and Winter 2020). Rather the goal has also been to sustain the idea of an Islamic state even if its geographical location disappeared.

In this respect, IS has consistently demonstrated an appreciation for the interplay between the MSM and social media (Williams 2016). Inside IS, the media strategy focused on maintaining control over the media ecology. Here the goal was to build a digital divide between those people living outside IS and those citizens who lived within it.4 For citizens of IS, access to enemy propaganda had to be limited. That involved limiting the availability of online media while using broadcast media like the radio or ‘media points’, which act as open air cinemas, to distribute IS propaganda. For those remote parts of IS, mobile ‘media points’ were used like agitprop trains.

All of this contrasts with how the rest of the world was exposed to IS. Here IS favoured a participative approach to war such that ‘[e]veryone that participate[s] in the production and delivery [of propaganda should be regarded as one of the IS’s] “media mujahidin’’’.5 IS has used gruesome and highly provocative acts of extreme violence in an effort to guarantee that its social media presence feeds into Western MSM reporting.

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