Newswise — Jihadis place a great deal of emphasis on developing comprehensive public relations and communication strategies to aid their side in the media war. That's according to communication researchers at Arizona State University who studied recently declassified al-Qaida documents and other open source reports captured in Iraq and Afghanistan during U.S. military operations.
"Their strategies are crafted after careful audience analysis and message adaptation, two of the most fundamental rules underlying any communication or public relations campaign," write the authors of a report released this week titled: "Communication and Media Strategy in the Jihadi War of Ideas." Contributing to the report are faculty members and graduate students in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Professor Steven Corman, who co-authored the report with graduate student Jill Schiefelbein, says that in his experience "people are surprised the jihadis think of media as a weapon."
Yet, by using text analysis techniques to review nearly 300 documents, some recently released from the Department of Defense's HARMONY database, the researchers concluded that jihadis place a great importance on media and public relations as part of their overall strategy.
"Their strategy is not hard to discern," Corman says. "All you have to do is listen to what they say and what they worry about."
For example, in a letter to Emir Al-Momineen, Osama bin Laden writes, "It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its ratio may reach 90% of the total preparation for the battles."
The researchers, working in collaboration with the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point, relied primarily on text in documents dated both before and after Sept. 11, 2001. The documents included letters, memos, statements and sermons, Corman says. Other sources include translated statements of jihadi leaders, as well as speeches, documents and Web site materials, all available in the open source literature.
The texts that were studied reveal three strategic goals for communication and media in jihadi operations, according to Corman.
"First, they must legitimate their movement by establishing its social and religious viability, while engaging in violent acts that on their face seem to violate the norms of civilized society and the tenets of Islam. Second, they aim to propagate their movement by spreading messages to sympathetic audiences in areas where they want to expand. Third, they seek to intimidate their opponents," write the researchers.
"Jihadis pursue these strategies using sophisticated, modern methods of communication and public relations," notes Corman. For example, there's evidence in the documents that the jihadis segment audiences and adapt their message to the audience, he says.
"They place great importance on having good slogans and on after-action reviews to determine what worked and what didn't," Corman says. Jihadis use some of the same PR techniques used by large corporations; they deploy disinformation campaigns and coordinate communication with operations, the researchers write in the report.
In particular, the report notes that "jihadis are technically savvy and intent on pushing jihad into the sphere of new media." The jihadis view new media, especially Internet-based communication and information technologies, "as a platform for global operations and virtual jihad."
"However, the jihadis' ability to implement such strategies is not well understood and has been 'systematically undervalued,'" according to conclusions drawn in the study. The authors make a number of recommendations on how to use this information to counter the jihadis' "war of ideas." One of the recommendations is to develop similar communication strategies, some of which would be designed to improve U.S. credibility with Muslim audiences.
"The nicest thing about this work is that it lets us — communication scholars and practitioners — bring theories and methods from our discipline to this important global problem of terrorism," Corman says.
He believes that their research — from a communication and public relations perspective — may be among the first done by non-military researchers, a statement supported by the director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center.
"Arizona State University is one of the first academic bodies taking a look at these documents, outside of a Department of Defense affiliated organization like us," says Jarret Brachman, an assistant professor and director of research at the center. The Combating Terrorism Center is a Department of Defense entity, housed at West Point.
"During the Cold War, America had a robust academic effort to better understand the communist ideology. We are not seeing a parallel research effort today. Scholars have been hesitant to engage in this conversation, in part because this is such a politically charged topic, and, in part because they've lacked access to data," Brachman says.
"ASU's work in this area will hopefully catalyze more academic institutions to undertake similar research," he says, "helping us to better understand and combat the radical ideology we face today."
The Combating Terrorism Center recently released its own report based on these texts, titled "Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting Al-Qa'ida's Organizational Vulnerabilities." According to Brachman, there are more than 750,000 documents in the HARMONY database, many written in Arabic, with a small but growing percentage translated into English.
The ASU study "Communication and Media Strategy in the Jihadi War of Ideas" is available to download at http://www.asu.edu/clas/communication/about/terrorism.
Also contributing to the study from the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication are: Bud Goodall, director of the school; Robert McPhee, professor; Angela Trethewey, associate professor; Kelly McDonald, assistant professor; and graduate students Kris Acheson, Ian Derk, Aaron Hess, Zachary Justus and Christina Smith. Associate professor Mark Woodward from the department of religious studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences also contributed.
College of Liberal Arts and SciencesArizona State UniversityTempe, Arizona USAhttp://www.asu.edu/clas | http://www.asu.edu/clas/communication
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