Legitimating Extremism: A Taxonomy of Justifications for Political Violence

Robert J. VandenBerg

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2021, vol. 33, issue 6, 1237-1255

Abstract: Terrorism is an inherently communicative enterprise in that it attempts to convey messages using violent means. Furthermore, the effective use of rhetoric is fundamental to the sustainment of militant campaigns. Nevertheless, the literature on terrorism currently lacks a comprehensive blueprint for analyzing terrorist discourse. This paper proposes a framework for classifying narrative frames that serve to justify acts of political violence. Drawing on the social movements literature, it utilizes the jihadist organizations Al Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State as primary examples to show how militants utilize defensive, moralistic, legalistic, imperialistic, and apocalyptic framing to legitimate acts of terrorism. It also demonstrates how these same categories can be applied to extremists animated by ideologies other than jihadism.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2019.1606800 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:33:y:2021:i:6:p:1237-1255

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2019.1606800

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().