Media Wars: The Caliphate Strikes Back. Islamic State’s Propaganda Magazine Dabiq as a Possible Paradigm Shift in Visual War Reporting and Propaganda

Sammanfattning: This thesis analyses the history and usage of war photography and propaganda according to theories of their utilisation for the establishment of national narratives in times of war. While Western media and nations alike try to establish narratives of just war without loss of innocent people and own soldiers, the newly emerged terrorist group Islamic State indicates a paradigm change in the approach of graphic content as part of propaganda. As a death cult, that glorifies the gruesome deaths of their foes and the martyrdom of their own, there is a strong case to claim that their official English language magazine Dabiq contains graphic content as part of narratives that utilise bare life to support the group’s narratives of desirable death. By doing a mixed method approach of content analysis and critical visual analysis, this paper generates quantitative data on the usage of graphic content and sets it into comparison to US publications on recent wars in the Middle East. In a more detailed approach that data set is refined through critical visual analysis to analyse the graphic content and portraits of the dead as some form of advertisement for death. In conclusion this thesis proves the claim that the Islamic State – opposing Western media – does not restrain from showing death and gore, but rather favours its publication for advertising purposes according to their narratives.