European Women Supporting Isis – A Study of Their Facebook Profiles

Human communication, offline as well as online, is about exchanging information, getting things done, expressing feelings and emotions in addition to conveying to one another who we are and what kind of people we are; where are loyalties are for example in religious and political terms and which social communities we belong to (e.g. de Fina 2006, 263). On Facebook, identities are expressed through names and handle names, profile pictures, banners and text on the profiles. In this paper, I will present multimodal discourse analyses (Kress 2010) of Facebook profiles set up by European women who support the Islamic State (ISIS). The research question guiding the analyses is: What types of discourses, modes and semiotic resources are these women drawn to, and how do they exploit them in setting up a Facebook profile consistent with the ISIS ideology? The analyses are based on ethnographic data obtained from Facebook and linguistic oriented analyses, thus extending beyond the common approaches of political science and sociology. The findings show that discourses related to the following Islamic concepts are prominent in their self-presentation on Facebook: hijra (migration), jihad (holy war), jannah (paradise) and ghurba (estrangement). The use of the concept of ghurba represents a new finding in the research on jihadi culture and radicalisation. Social media is an arena where people can experiment with extreme identities anonymously and, through these identities, get in contact with milieus or individuals holding radical and extremist views. In this paper, I will argue that the feeling of ghurba and the discursive use of ghurba may contribute to the processes of radicalisation online. References De Fina, A. (2006). “Discourse and Identity”. In Discourse Studies, edited by Teun A. van Dijk, 263-282. Los Angeles: SAGE. Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge.