Drawn from a larger project defining Islamic State as a war machine that operates through spectacle, this article explains Islamic State’s spectacle and analyses the counter-spectacle enacted by the group’s opponent opponents. I first analyze the media doctrine behind IS’s spectacle through a close reading of IS publications about media and propaganda, including The Management of Savagery, O’ Media Worker You are a Mujahid, and Why I Must Destroy the Satellite Dish. Second, I analyze selected IS visual artefacts and demonstrate how they reflect the IS media doctrine. Third, I translate insights from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967/1992), written as a critique of bourgeois capitalism, to Islamic State, using Debord’s concept of spectacle—a tautological inversion of life— to analyze IS’s communicative and cultural production, referring to exemplars. The IS spectacle, I argue, is predicated on the global circulation and management of terror as an affect of fear. Fourth, I explore the counter-spectacle mounted by Arab activists, artists and media producers, focusing on satirical television skits from Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon. Using theories of affect (Deleuze, Massumi, Virilio), humor and subversion (Bakhtin, Rose, Scott) and fun (Bayat), I analyze the counter-spectacle as an archetypal manifestation of détournement, or disruption, an anti-spectacle technique Debord himself advocated, manifested in an affect of fun. Finally, I probe the ontological connections and tensions between “fear” and “fun,” and discuss the political potential of fun.

In areas under its control, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has abolished existing school textbooks and replaced them with a new curriculum. To prepare children to be fighters by the age of 16, this new curriculum eliminates two years of school education, cutting down the total number of grades from twelve to ten. As part of its plan, ISIS has employed extensive use of poetry in its textbook curriculum. Starting at middle school, ISIS introduces an Arabic Literature textbook and allocates a chapter to discuss its vision of poetry’s impact. The chapter specifically states that ISIS considers poetry “a weapon of jihad.” This paper seeks to explore how this goal is translated into practice in the organization’s textbook curriculum. Consequently, this paper seeks to examine how ISIS uses Arabic poetry to indoctrinate children as obedient followers of its extremist ideology. Through textual and visual selections, as well as analyses of the organization’s instructions for teachers, the paper examines how ISIS exploits poetry in schools to influence youth and reinforce its power starting as early as first grade. The vast selections of poetry used by ISIS include both classical and modern texts, and encompass a variety of themes and subject matters. This presents an interesting strategy whereby ISIS employs two distinct categories of poetic texts. The first category includes jihadist poetry that is written specifically to incite ruthless militant jihad and encourage loyalty to the organization’s extremist ideology. The second category consists of poetic texts spanning classical, medieval, and modern times. This includes the works of both classical and medieval Arab poets who are not known for religious poetry, in part because many are pre-Islamic poets. The expansive selections include works by such poets as Zuhayr bin Abi Sulma (520 – ?609), Antarah ibn Shaddad (525–608), Hassan ibn Thabit (563-674), Abu Tammam (788–845), Ibn Sahl of Seville (1212–1251), and many others. In other words, many of these poets belong to an age termed as Jahiliyyah, or “ignorance of divine guidance.” How can a Takfiri group like ISIS extensively draw upon historical figures it considers as infidels? The answer to this reveals one of reasons for the organization’s powerful propaganda apparatus: its adaptability and manipulative tactics. ISIS is able to include this poetry in its curriculum by twisting critical analysis and sociohistorical context in favor of a fundamentalist interpretation that fits its ideological goals.

Countering Daesh Extremism - Perspectives from Belgium Since its sudden rise in 2012 and subsequent swift expansion across swathes of Iraq and Syria, Daesh has triggered an unprecedented flux of 30.000 migrating foreign terrorist fighters (FTF’s) joining its self-proclaimed “Caliphate” from more than 100 different countries. (SPECKHARD, 2016) While several EU member States have been severely affected by this phenomenon, Belgium has become more specifically the focal point of media attention since most members of the commandos that targeted Paris in November 2015 and Brussels in March 2016 came from the Belgian capital. The “heart of Europe” had previously been finger-pointed as having provided the largest contingent of European FTF’s per capita to the Syrian battlefield, but these late attacks further associated municipalities like Molenbeek-Saint-Jean to major hubs of homegrown European jihadism. Drawing from a Brussels-based daily monitoring of the associated topicality, this paper will firstly attempt to synthesize Daesh-linked activities in Belgium from the first departures involving members of radical Salafi movement “Sharia4Belgium” until the recent threats emanating from Raqqa against Prime Minister Charles Michel in the summer of 2016. Secondly, it will propose an analysis of the major features that characterize the “Belgian foreign fighters” and their motivations. Adding data from qualitative interviews led in Belgium and in the Levant region since 2012 to previous research (COOLSAET, 2016), specific attention will be paid to the staggering over-representation of young fighters coming from the second or third generation of Moroccan immigration (roughly 80% of the total contingent). The main theoretical avenue that will be explored here will be that of “re-islamization process” , which typically takes place outside of family education and official mosques networks. (AMGHAR, 2006) Thirdly, it will assess in a EU-scaled comparative approach the national response that has been given so far to this ongoing threat at home and abroad (in Iraq and Syria), before concluding with future perspectives on the broader fight against the “Daesh phenomenon”.

Foreign fighters have always been integral components of war. With the onset of the 2011 Syrian Civil War and ongoing spill-over effects of intervention in Iraq since 2003, the global foreign fighter problem became exacerbated as the scope of their involvement expanded into a much wider territoriality with significant resources and population base. There is a growing literature on why radicalised individuals from afar countries travel to join an armed movement. Why foreign fighters radicalise and operate the way they do in distant environments gives us insight into why modern conflicts and insurgencies are getting increasingly multi-national, evidenced most clearly first, with Al Qaeda and then, the Islamic State. In this article, we are interested in why people join ISIL is important for three main reasons: (1) Creating a model for radicalization and what condition(s) enable outsiders to fight foreign wars. This is particularly important for understanding volunteerism from countries with high levels of human development, democracy and income equality, which are traditionally offered as remedies against radicalization. (2) Understanding some of the social and economic factors associated with radicalization, that may exacerbate and prolong the effects of radicalization upon foreign fighters’return back to their origin country (the scope of the blowback effect) (3) Establishing a framework for predicting radicalization before it occurs and helping countries take steps in due policy areas to mitigate their nationals joining the ranks of the global foreign fighter pool. We do this by using two extensive datasets of ISIS fighters – the so-called ‘Raqqa Ledger’ and ‘Sinjar Records’, with a detailed breakdown of fighters from origin countries. Then, we use statistical methods to understand whether social, political or economic exclusion is a more important determinant of ISIS recruitment in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Overall, we find that political exclusion has a greater explanatory value of ISIS recruitment from Muslim countries, whereas social exclusion plays a greater role in non-Muslim countries.