Violence As Discursive Event: The Islamic State and Public Punishment This paper examines the practice of public punishment by the group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS) during its period of territorial control in Iraq and Syria. IS, or broader jihadi, violence has been sensationally framed as “senseless” in official and media discourse. Scholarly research has sought to understand IS violence through such lenses as performativity/performance, spectacle and public sphere. Seeking to expand our understanding of public violence, I develop an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that fuses discourse theory with the concept of sovereign power in Foucault and Agamben’s works, as well as jahiliyya and hakimiyya in Islamic political thought, I suggest we should understand IS’s practices of public punishment as discursive events designed to disseminate certain discourses of power, produce specific subject positions/roles, and signal the ruling power’s expectations of appropriate behavior on the part of the ruled populations. Unlike other uses of it, the notion of discursive event that I propose here entails understanding public punishments as embodied texts through which the sovereign power imparts certain interpretable meanings to the intended spectators/audiences. Analyzing a number of primary IS-produced multimedia communication materials pertaining to public punishment, I argue that through such spectacular performances of violence in public spaces IS projected itself as the absolute sovereign power in control of the lives and territories it ruled. This I call a discourse of temporal (in the sense of this worldly) sovereignty. But public punishments were not just an expression of (brute) power and strength. They were also designed to generate a discourse of piety and legitimacy by justifying the punishments as a demonstration of the group’s commitment to a strict understanding and implementation of huddud (or punitive) provisions of the Islamic sharia law. This vision of huddud, although stripped of the nuances of spatial-temporal context, reflected a critical part of IS’s ideology that considers real sovereignty to be a prerogative of God (hakimiyya), and hence implementation of shar’i huddud as an unwavering sign of piety and religious legitimacy. Ultimately, the projections of both strength and religious piety were devised to construct different subject positions and roles. The discourse of temporal sovereignty aimed to discipline the ruled populations and create obedient subjects. The discourse of religious piety (or the group’s self-perception as an implementer of divine sovereignty) sought to ensure loyalty among religiously ultraconservative individuals, and produce loyal and dedicated subjects.