Summary
Public diplomacy can be one element of multifaceted counter-terrorism strategy, but to be successful it must be used in timely fashion as a preventive tool. One key to reducing the threat posed by terrorism is to turn off terror groups’ recruiting faucets, and public diplomacy can play an important role in doing this. This article explores the vulnerability of certain populations and how they might be reached and strengthened in ways that undercut terrorist recruitment. This includes recognizing the importance of religion in terrorist recruiting and how it may be addressed constructively. Further, traditional pubic diplomacy programmes such as educational and cultural exchanges have been underestimated as a mean of counteracting the ‘othering’ that increases vulnerable populations’ susceptibility to terrorist recruitment.
Introduction
During the past decade, the most noted defeats inflicted on terrorist organizations have been through conventional military action, with some other (less acclaimed) successes by law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community. The 2011 US Special Operations’ attack in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which killed Osama bin Laden, and the lengthy 2016-2017 siege of Mosul, Iraq, which deprived (the self-proclaimed) Islamic State of one of its strongholds were different in scale but similar in being post facto responses to terrorist acts.
Preventive measures to disrupt terrorist operations have fared less well, in part because no government has yet designed a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy that consistently prevents, rather than retaliates for, extremist violence. After five years of fighting in Iraq, the US military recognized that its counter-insurgency strategy needed to be adjusted. The new doctrine, as articulated by General David Petraeus, included points that could be useful in ‘soft’ counter-terrorism measures. Petraeus wrote:
We cannot kill our way out of this endeavour. […] Realize that we are in a struggle for legitimacy that will be won or lost in the perception of the Iraqi people. […] Develop and sustain a narrative that works, and continually drive the themes home through all forms of media.1
When the point is reached at which conventional military force must be relied upon as the principal counter-terrorism strategy, efforts to contain terrorist recruitment and activity will already have failed. This is in large part because of policy-makers’ reflexive embrace of traditional military action when faced with a dangerous enemy, which makes sense when an enemy commits itself to conventional battleground tactics, but such terrorist behaviour is an aberration. Most terrorist organizations’ leaders understand that they will be fatally overmatched when following such a course. They know that to survive requires two basic measures: minimize exposure to kinetic counter-terrorism operations; and recruit followers in large enough numbers to replace losses and expand influence.
Addressing the former measure is largely the business of the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities. For the latter, public diplomacy can play a useful, albeit not exclusive, role. Responding to terrorism requires comprehensiveness and diverse tactics. Just as an Iraqi battlefield may be the site of part of this response, so too may a London school classroom be an appropriate venue for efforts to undercut the appeal of extremism. (Note that the latter approach draws its share of criticism, particularly from those who consider such efforts as easily slipping into fostering ethnic or religious profiling.)2
Is terrorism prevention an appropriate public diplomacy task? Can public diplomacy be an effective part of larger counter-terrorism strategy? If not, why not? Assuming that public diplomacy is defined as advancing national interests through outreach to foreign publics, this would seem to be a perfectly acceptable assignment. In this instance, the national interest is clear — preventing terrorism. Foreign publics, with assistance, may become more effective in adjusting their socio-political environments in ways that make them less hospitable to extremism.
As for these efforts needing to be strategic rather than merely tactical, counter-terrorism is not a boxing match, so more must be involved than punch and counter-punch. Messaging should be based on a carefully considered set of premises that involve more than preventive persuasion, but rather are built upon a commitment to strengthen civil-society institutions that by their existence will help create an environment in which violent extremism would have difficulty in gaining a foothold.
This strategy is related to the larger issue of redefining and expanding the role of public diplomacy within the spectrum of foreign affairs. Before the early years of this century, most people around the world had only a tenuous grasp of global affairs, because information flows were narrow in scope and limited in diversity of viewpoints. Diplomacy was the domain of an elite corps of professional diplomats, such as Britain’s Harold Nicolson, who soon after the end of the Second World War wrote:
There was a feeling that foreign affairs were a specialized and esoteric study, the secrets of which lay beyond the scope of the ordinary layman’s experience or judgment. […] In the days of the old diplomacy, it would have been regarded as an act of unthinkable vulgarity to appeal to the common people upon any issue of international policy.3
Today, such an observation is quaintly unrealistic because ‘the common people’ — now more politely referred to as ‘the public’ — may choose from among an almost unlimited array of information resources that are accessible on one’s mobile phone with a tap and glance. Given that global publics can, in many cases, now become as engaged with the larger world as they choose to be, appealing to them has become not an ‘act of unthinkable vulgarity’, but rather a political necessity.
Necessary it may be, but appealing to global publics is today a highly competitive matter. Being heard above the cacophony of countless media venues and then, once heard, being convincing is a far more complex task that it was during the days of more hegemonic international communication. Hence, if the expanded relevance of public diplomacy is recognized, it is logical that public-diplomacy tools and tactics be used widely by governments’ foreign-policy agencies, including those that are tasked with counter-terrorism.
Targeting Terrorist Recruitment
Daniel Byman noted that:
There is no consistent path to radicalization. Some recruits are motivated by the killing of Muslims in wars, while others recoil at discrimination. Some are socially alienated, while others simply seek the thrill of blowing stuff up and killing people.4
Terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State recruit in various ways. Family connections have proved successful, such as cousin recruiting cousin; so have face-to-face contacts, in home and diasporic communities. Perhaps the most secure and broadest recruitment efforts have been through social media venues, although this approach most likely inspires activism by ‘recruiting’ independent operators rather than enlisting active participants in a terrorist group’s core organization. As J.M. Berger, Mia Bloom and others have noted, Islamic State operatives have devoted considerable effort to courting prospective recruits one-on-one online.5 Again, public diplomacy’s role in countering such ventures is to help make the recruiting grounds inhospitable for extremist recruiters.
Terrorist Messaging
How to go about this? For a start, take ideas from the extremists’ playbook; mimic their messaging formats to deliver the flipside of their content. When terrorist sites show ‘infidels’ murdered in purported jihad, the counter-message should present photographic evidence of the Muslims killed in terror attacks and the impact of these deaths on the victims’ families, and so on. Designing such content must be done with care — many in this audience are wary about outside intervention — and it must be delivered promptly, forcefully and consistently. The communicators of Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab and other such groups are skilful opportunists. They must be outmanoeuvred at their own game.
In this context, the terrorist paradigm (for the moment) is Islamic State (IS). Despite its significant defeats in Mosul, Raqqa and elsewhere, Islamic State’s media versatility between 2014 and 2017 was impressive. IS techies proved themselves to be energetic, creating an array of new media baubles: smartphone apps; multilingual videos; a radio station (Al Bayan); jihadist chants (nasheeds); an online magazine (Dabiq); and even video games. It also has its own news agency, Amaq, which it uses to send news releases with headings such as ‘Breaking News’ and ‘Exclusive’, often first doing so in English when seeking broad international coverage.6
The diverse IS media repertoire is evidence of the rapidly growing sophistication of terrorist media capabilities. Just a decade before the explosive presence of IS was recognized, Al Qaeda was content to make videotapes through its As Sahab production facility and send them to television channels such as Al Jazeera in hopes that edited versions would be broadcast. Al Qaeda also worked online, producing an online magazine, Voice of Jihad (Sawt al-Jihadi) and training manuals such as Technical Mujahid Magazine, which emphasized cybersecurity as well as calling on ‘Muslim internet professionals to spread and disseminate news and information about the Jihad through e-mail lists, discussion groups, and their own websites’.7
International broadcasting has long been one of the core elements of public diplomacy, featuring the likes of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Today, such broadcasting enterprises remain important, but they account for a considerably smaller portion of the global communication universe.
Socio-economic Issues
It is important to understand these and similar terrorist communication capabilities in order to counter them effectively. It is also necessary to recognize conditions that may contribute to young people’s susceptibility to terrorist recruitment. After the 2011 Arab uprisings, Tunisia was touted as the country most likely to build on its nascent democratic reforms, but Tunisia sent more foreign fighters to Islamic State than any other country, which indicates the depth of frustration among its people. Writing in The New Yorker, George Packer observed that the 2011 uprisings gave young Tunisians ‘the freedom to act on their unhappiness. By raising and then frustrating expectations, the revolution created conditions for radicalization to thrive’. Education, even higher education, is not in itself the answer, because, as Packer found, ‘educated Tunisians are twice as likely to be unemployed as uneducated ones because the economy creates so few professional jobs’. One IS supporter told Packer: ‘If you want to stop terrorism, then bring good schools, bring transportation — because the roads are terrible — and bring jobs for young people’.8
Along similar lines, Kartika Bhatia and Hafez Ghanem wrote:
Our analysis shows that while it seems to be true that unemployment on its own does not impact radicalization, unemployment among the educated leads to a greater probability of radicalization. Hence, our work provides empirical support to the view that relative deprivation is an important driver of support for violent extremism. Individuals whose expectations for economic improvement and social mobility are frustrated are at a greater risk of radicalization.9
That makes sense. If someone has a job and is working to support their family, they may be less likely to be lured away by appeals based on political or religious issues, while if they are despairing about making ends meet and finding themselves in a hopeless financial situation, they might be more susceptible to extremist recruitment. Yet the backgrounds of the hijackers in the 9/11 attacks on the United States make clear that such criteria are not necessarily determinative. Mohamed Atta, the leader of the hijacking team, had a degree in architectural engineering from Cairo University. Other members of the ‘Hamburg contingent’ involved in the 9/11 attacks had studied at German universities. These men’s radicalization had pronounced religious components, but there was no evidence that financial factors were behind their suicidal terrorism.10
Nevertheless, the idle young man in a Jordanian refugee camp or a young woman in a poverty-ridden Paris banlieue might be less susceptible to extremist overtures if their lives included more hope and less despair. If that is so, a case can be made for public diplomacy efforts that offer alternatives to the status quo. The distinction between public diplomacy and development assistance may be artificial, based more on protecting bureaucratic turf than on effectively reaching targeted publics. In many parts of the world, contacts from the United States are viewed with scepticism, if not hostility, and the most likely way to overcome that may be to provide a satisfactory answer to ‘How will this help me?’
As described by the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy, public diplomacy is ‘a key mechanism through which nations foster mutual trust and productive relationships and has become crucial to building a secure global environment’.11 On a more pragmatic level, the fundamental mission of public diplomacy is to advance the national interests of the sponsoring state. If this is the case, and if counter-terrorism (or ‘countering violent extremism’) is deemed to be in the national interest in terms of ‘building a secure global environment’, then public diplomacy strategies and tactics might be adjusted to more directly address this.
To use the United States government as an example, the ‘Joint Strategic Plan FY 2018-2022’ issued by the Department of State and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) stated one of its goals as:
[…] to degrade global terrorism threats so local governments and security forces can contain them and restore stability. We will work to consolidate military gains against ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria], AQ [Al Qaeda], and other terrorist organizations and stabilize liberated areas by supporting local partners that can re-establish the rule of law, manage conflict, and restore basic services. We believe that diplomatic engagement and targeted development assistance to stabilize affected areas will help prevent new recruitment, reduce levels of violence, promote legitimate governance structures that strengthen inclusion, and reduce policies that marginalize communities [emphasis added].12
This sounds good, but it leaves unclear which persons within which agencies are to be responsible for doing this work. How much of the effort would fall to the State Department’s public diplomacy professionals? Delegating this responsibility and providing the necessary funding to public diplomacy offices would be logical if policy-makers are sincere about using public diplomacy in efforts to undermine terrorist recruitment and operations.
Religion
Religious studies scholar Huston Smith observed, ‘The surest way to the heart of a people is through their faith’.13 That would seem to place religion at the heart of public diplomacy, but religion’s role in diplomacy varies greatly around the world. Its broad effect on culture and on public opinion is often little understood. Barry Rubin noted, ‘In modern times, religion has increasingly been seen in the West as a theological set of issues rather than a profoundly political influence in public life’.14 Depending on the nature of the state and the culture, separation between the theological and the political may be a fundamental premise, or this division may be non-existent. Along similar lines, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright noted ‘the immense power of religion to influence how people, think, feel, and act’. She wrote: ‘Religion at its best can reinforce the core values necessary for people from different cultures to live in some degree of harmony; we should make the most of that possibility’.15
Terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State define their mission and shape their appeal in religious terms. They claim that their bloody actions are conducted in the name of religion as they defend fellow Muslims. This defames Islam and should be forcefully challenged by public diplomacy efforts. Many policy-makers, however, are wary about adding a religion component to public diplomacy. For the United States, this is partly rooted in the Constitutional mandate for separation of church and state, even though this is applicable only to domestic governance, not foreign affairs. The concept, however, seems to be a stRAND of the American diplomatic DNA. As a result, diplomats contemplating outreach may decide that foreign religious sensitivities are so volatile that attempts at engagement related to religion would be unwise.
Such timidity means passing up a potentially valuable connection with a targeted public. Some diplomats recognize this: Albright is among those who have proposed that US embassies’ staffs should include a religion attaché.16 Another former US State Department official, Haroon Ullah, endorsed a straightforward approach that is of particular relevance to counter-terrorism: ‘In the area of public diplomacy […] we should be directly challenging the idea that the West is absolutely opposed to Islam’.17 Given that terrorist organizations such as Islamic State and Al Qaeda put their version of Islam at the centre of their recruitment efforts, it is self-defeating not to address this in counter-terrorism and through public diplomacy programmes more generally.
Among the religion-oriented initiatives that could be part of public diplomacy efforts is outreach to Islamic education. Many Islamic schools (madrasas) emphasize rote learning of the Qur’an and other religious texts to the exclusion of teaching critical thinking. This eases the way for radicalization of the students. Broadening curricula and pedagogy can be done, even in the presumably inhospitable environment of places such as western Pakistan. A US-based non-governmental organization (NGO), the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD), has found success in its work there with more than 5,000 madrasas, encouraging the teaching of religious tolerance, human rights and other such topics. Working in western Pakistan since 2004, the ICRD has recently passed supervision of the projects to local control, while successfully encouraging Pakistani universities to begin training programmes for madrasa teachers and developing resources for teaching peace-building and conflict resolution, based on Islamic principles.18 In the Arab world, the ICRD has supplemented its emphasis on education with programmes to strengthen civil society in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen and Syria.
If an NGO can accomplish so much, it stands to reason that governments’ public diplomacy efforts could follow similar paths and perhaps achieve similar success. Doing so, whether the emphasis is on education or other facets of civil society, would require an enlightened recognition of the synergy between religion and diplomacy.
Creating Narratives
Narratives are the heart of public diplomacy. They are the stories crafted to appeal to the publics that a government wants to influence. Narratives emphasize attributes that these publics are thought to admire and perhaps would want to emulate. Soft power, built on the preference for attraction rather than coercion, relies heavily on narratives.
That might sound like an idealized approach to global affairs, but narratives are also useful for those who are intent on creating conflict and spreading terror. Modern terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State have shown themselves skilled at developing and sustaining narratives. A 2018 RAND report prepared for the US Army noted that Islamic State’s narrative ‘is incredibly effective, for both unifying the group’s operations and messages and providing a compelling frame to supporters and potential supporters’.19
Alister Miskimmon, Ben O’Loughlin and Laura Roselle wrote that ‘Al Qaeda’s narrative sought to convince Muslim audiences to understand the ongoing conflict as part of a wider historical global attack on Islam by a belligerent Zionist–Crusader alliance’. This was a straightforward formulation that, according to Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle, ‘offered great certainty for those confused or disappointed by world events’.20 Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama Bin Laden, recognized the advantage of having an often-repeated, easily comprehensible theme around which to rally his supporters.
Islamic State communicators were even more adroit at this. They constructed a narrative about Islam being under siege and a caliphate being constructed as a secure homeland — not merely a battleground — for Muslims. One of the principal arguments advanced by Islamic State has been that Muslims are widely vilified and, as noted by Jad Melki and May Jabado, ‘the caliphate is an alternative world where the Muslim is desired and successful, rather than being alienated and considered a nuisance, a message perpetuated by many right-wing Western politicians’.21 Islamic State bolstered its case with recruiting videos showing not only fighters in action, but also doctors working in an Islamic State hospital and men with their sons at an Islamic State playground. The narrative was that Islamic State was not a collection of psychopaths, but rather a community dedicated to building a safe and thriving home for devout Muslims.
Given the bloody histories of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, one would think that effective counter-narratives could have been designed and constructed quickly. But that did not happen. The US government’s response after the 2001 terror attacks was largely ineffective. The State Department’s public diplomacy office created products such as a series of short videos showing Muslim Americans embracing life in the United States. This ‘Shared Values’ campaign, which cost US$ 15 million (and was derided by some as the ‘Happy Muslims’ videos), never gained traction. In some Muslim countries, television stations found the spots so insipid that they refused to air them. From there, the State Department tried various approaches, including sarcasm directed at excerpts from Islamic State’s own videos. These efforts were identified as US government products, which presumably did not enhance their credibility. Nothing the US State Department tried seemed to resonate with the young Muslims at whom the messaging was directed.22
That changed when the State Department made a fresh start by creating a Global Engagement Center (GEC) led by Michael Lumpkin, a former US Department of Defense official. Using Facebook profile data to identify young people who appeared interested in extremist causes, the GEC sponsored advertisements that appeared on these young persons’ cell phones and computer screens. The content was forcefully anti-jihadist, always in the language of the audience. During the six months beginning in September 2016, the advertisements were seen more than 14 million times. The GEC also placed their advertisements on YouTube; any YouTube user searching for Islamic State videos would see the GEC spots.23 The number of viewings does not necessarily equate with effectiveness, but at least the US effort was technologically innovative.
In Britain, the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communication Unit (RICU) reported that Al Qaeda’s narrative ‘combines fact, fiction, emotion and religion and manipulates discontent about local and international issues. The narrative is simple, flexible and infinitely accommodating’. The RICU report recommended that such extremist narratives be challenged, and it noted that such an effort’s objective ‘is not to dismiss “grievances” but undermine Al Qaeda’s position as their champion and violent extremism as their solution’.24
Furthermore, to counter extremist messaging, Joseph Nye wrote that ‘democratic leaders must use soft or attractive power to disseminate a positive narrative about globalization and the prospects for a better future that attracts moderates and counters the poisonous jihadist narratives on the Web’.25
As with any public diplomacy effort, counter-terrorism requires understanding the targeted publics, especially how they perceive their place in the global community. H.L. Goodall, Jr., Angela Trethewey and Kelly McDonald wrote that when engaging in strategic communication, ‘Do not seek to control a message’s meaning in cultures we do not fully understand. Control over preferred interpretations is a false goal in a diverse mediated communication environment’.26 Therefore it may make sense to outsource message development to those who know the audience better — in this case, Arab media producers. The US State Department finally did this, encouraging Arab media corporations such as the Saudi-owned Middle East Broadcasting Center to develop entertainment content. One example is ‘Black Crows’, a television series that aired during Ramadan in 2017 and depicted Islamic State with unrestrained harshness, particularly in illustrating how Islamic State has treated women.27 How successful this series was in stirring anti-IS sentiment is debatable, but the concept of encouraging Arabs to speak to Arabs in counter-terrorism efforts makes sense.
This programme was more sophisticated in its approach than anything the US government had produced, but its impact was difficult to measure. At least it provided a new, widely discussed element in regional debate about Islamic State. This case illustrates both the potential and the limits of public diplomacy efforts: potential in terms of using media products to affect public discourse; and limits in the sense that even a country that is committed to using public diplomacy might not always understand the publics that it wants to reach.
Possible Changes
In the struggle against terrorism, public diplomacy has had a reputation in some circles as being not particularly useful — inherently too ‘nice’ to be effective when dealing with terrorists — and therefore marginalized within the larger government bureaucracy. There is some truth to this, and thus to become more relevant, public diplomacy must adapt to changes in the environment in which it must work.
The successes of the Global Engagement Center that are noted above are exceptions, not the rule. Late in US President Obama’s administration, its mission was altered to place prime emphasis on counteracting Russian information warfare, but during Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s subsequent tenure (which ended in March 2018), the GEC was given little direction or money, and for a time it did not have a single Russian speaker on its staff to carry out its new tasks.
Making public diplomacy more relevant in the future in facing counter-terrorism and other contemporary challenges will require honing a hard edge on soft power. This does not mean that conventional public diplomacy programmes such as educational and cultural exchanges should be jettisoned. In fact, they will remain of great value in suggesting alternative life goals to young people who otherwise might be susceptible to extremists’ appeals. These are long-term ventures and their results might not become apparent for years. Also, they must be supplemented by projects designed to meet the specific demands of fighting smart, resilient terrorist enemies.
This means, for example, that information programmes — broadcast, online and other — must be as innovative and persistent as those produced by extremists. They must be created by the best possible sources, even if this means setting aside pride of authorship in favour of relying on a greater amount of outsourcing, particularly when seeking to reach the young people targeted by extremist recruiters. A 2016 Chatham House report cited alienation growing out of feelings of disempowerment and stressed the need for ‘provision of platforms for young people to express their views’.28
This relates to the ways in which the rise of new media affects public diplomacy. Connectivity, especially provided by social media, empowers publics in unprecedented ways, or at least creates aspirations of empowerment. These publics, individually and collectively, expect to be listened to and to participate in conversations that were formerly dominated by corporate information providers and governments. Instead of being a passive ‘audience’ receiving information through one-way communication, individuals can respond to the sources of information. They can also build their own online communities of interest within which ideas — positive and negative — can be exchanged. In some circumstances, this can be used to stimulate political mobilization, which also may be positive or negative. If social media venues are filled with young voices complaining about being discriminated against and being unable to find jobs or access social services, the task of extremist recruiters becomes much easier. If, on the other hand, social media conversations focus on programmes offering opportunity, then violence and martyrdom will more likely seem pointless.29
This points to a larger issue. In the United States and other countries, public diplomacy has been used in spotty ways as a second-tier supplement to civil and military strategies, and too often it is reactive rather than proactive. Many public diplomacy programmes — ranging from the British Council’s English-language training to the American creation of the TechGirls exchange programme30 — offer young people positive options. But they tend to be isolated, rather than parts of a coherent policy.
If public diplomacy is to be of maximum value in counter-terrorism, it needs to become more prominent as governments shapes their foreign policy, especially in programmes that help countries build or strengthen civil society. Former Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy observed that ‘terrorism in the Middle East is a direct derivative of the breakdown of the social contract and the absence of effective state institutions’.31 A 2016 US State Department report echoed this: ‘In many environments where the risk of violent extremism is high, development has failed to take root, governance is weak, access to education and training is limited, economic opportunities are few, and unemployment is high’.32
These are fundamental issues that, for various reasons, have remained inadequately addressed by many nations’ policy-makers. A holistic approach to public diplomacy, giving it a more central role in foreign policy, will not be a panacea, but among the publics it reaches it may help to create a future of more solid resistance to the allure of extremism.
Philip Seib
is Professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy and Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC). He served as Director of the USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy from 2009-2013, and as Vice Dean of the USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism from 2015-2016. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Headline Diplomacy (New York: Praeger, 1996); New Media and the New Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); The Al Jazeera Effect (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2008); Toward A New Public Diplomacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); (with Dana Janbek) Global Terrorism and New Media (New York: Routledge, 2010); Al Jazeera English (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Real-Time Diplomacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and The Future of Diplomacy (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). His latest book is As Terrorism Evolves: Media, Religion, and Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is editor of an academic book series on international political communication, co-editor of a series on global public diplomacy, and was a founding co-editor of the journal Media, War & Conflict.
David H. Petraeus, ‘Multi-National Force–Iraq Commanders’ Counterinsurgency Guidance’, Military Review (September-October 2008), pp. 2 and 4.
Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, ‘British Efforts to Identify Potential Radicals Spurs Debate Over Profiling’, The New York Times (9 February 2016).
Harold Nicolson, Diplomacy (London: Oxford University Press, second edition 1950), pp. 10, 168.
Daniel Byman, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 219.
J.M. Berger, ‘Tailored Online Interventions: The Islamic State’s Recruitment Strategy’, Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel, vol. 8, no. 10 (October 2015), available online at https://ctc.usma.edu/tailored-online-interventions-the-islamic-states-recruitment-strategy/; Mia Bloom, ‘Constructing Expertise: Terrorist Recruitment and “Talent-Spotting” in the PIRA, Al Qaeda, and ISIS’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 40, no. 7 (2017), available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2016.1237219.
Philip Seib, As Terrorism Evolves (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 119.
Gabriel Weimann, Terror on the Internet (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2006), pp. 65 and 67.
George Packer, ‘Exporting Jihad’, The New Yorker (28 March 2016).
Kartika Bhatia and Hafez Ghanem, How Do Education and Unemployment Affect Support for Violent Extremism, Brookings Institution Global Economy and Development Working Paper no. 102 (March 2017), available online at https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/global_20170322_violent-extremism.pdf.
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 160-165.
See https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/277156.pdf (February 2018), p. 26.
Huston Smith, The Illustrated World’s Religions (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 13.
Barry Rubin, ‘Religion and International Affairs’, in Dennis R. Hoover and Douglas M. Johnston (eds), Religion and Foreign Affairs (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), p. 521; see also Philip Seib, The Future of Diplomacy (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), pp. 96-99.
Madeleine Albright, The Mighty and the Almighty (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2007), pp. 67, 78.
Albright, The Mighty and the Almighty, p. 76.
Haroon Ullah, Digital World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 239.
Christopher Paul, Colin P. Clarke, Michael Schwille, Jakub P. Hlavka, Michael A. Brown, Steven S. Davenport, Isaac R. Porche III and Joel Harding, Lessons from Others for Future US Army Operations in and through the Information Environment (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2018), p. 16.
Alister Miskimmon, Ben O’Loughlin and Laura Roselle, Strategic Narratives (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), p. 42.
Jad Melki and May Jabado, ‘Mediated Public Diplomacy of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: The Synergistic Use of Terrorism, Social Media, and Branding’, Media and Communication, vol. 4, no. 2 (2016), p. 100.
Greg Miller and Scott Higham, ‘In a Propaganda War against ISIS, the US Tried to Play by the Enemy’s Rules’, The Washington Post (8 May 2015).
Joby Warrick, ‘How a US Team Uses Facebook, Guerrilla Marketing to Peel off Potential ISIS Recruits’, The Washington Post (6 February 2017).
Alan Travis, ‘Battle Against Al Qaeda Brand Highlighted in Secret Papers’, The Guardian (26 August 2008).
Joseph Nye, ‘How to Counter Terrorism’s Online Generation’, The Financial Times (13 October 2005).
H.L. Goodall, Jr, Angela Trethewey and Kelly McDonald, ‘Strategic Ambiguity, Communication, and Public Diplomacy in an Uncertain World’, in Steven R. Corman, Angela Trethewey and H.L. Goodall, Jr, Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Strategic Communication to Combat Violent Extremism (New York, NY: Peter Land, 2008), p. 35.
Ben Hubbard, ‘Arab TV Series Dramatizes Life under ISIS’, The New York Times (16 May 2017).
Claire Spencer and Saad Aldouri, ‘Young Arab Voices: Moving Youth Policy from Debate into Action’, Chatham House Research Paper (May 2016), p. 2, available online at https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/publications/research/2016-05-13-young-arab-voices-spencer-aldouri.pdf.
Seib, As Terrorism Evolves, p. 170.
TechGirls is an exchange programme that in 2016 brought 27 teenage girls from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia to the United States to participate in three weeks of training in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). In addition to classroom training, they received mentoring from tech industry leaders. Admittedly, 27 is not a large number, but there are now more than 100 alumnae of the programme and they have trained more than 2,300 other teenage girls in their home countries.
Nabil Fahmy, ‘A Call for Arab Diplomacy’, Cairo Review of Global Affairs, no. 21 (spring 2016), p. 81.
‘Department of State and USAID Joint Strategy on Countering Violent Extremism’ (May 2016), available online at https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/257913.pdf.