Theology, heroism, justice, and fear: an analysis of ISIS propaganda magazines<i>Dabiq</i>and<i>Rumiyah</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyses a large content sample of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) English-language magazines. Dabiq (15 issues, 2014–2016) and Rumiyah (13 issues, 2016–2017) represent the largest cohesive text sample of ISIS propaganda targeted at English speakers. This qualitative analysis, creates a typology to explain and categorize articles within the sample. Magazine articles are divided into five categories: (1) Islamic theological justification and inspiration for violence, (2) descriptions of community, belonging, and meaning, (3) stories of progress or heroism, (4) establishment of a common enemy, i.e., the West and Muslim “apostate s,” and (5) instructional and inspirational articles empowering individual violent action. A focus on unity and community was more common in Dabiq, while instructional articles encouraging lone wolf attacks appeared more often in Rumiyah. Moreover, tales of heroism and progress are far more common in Dabiq, while Rumiyah issues focus on Islamic justification and call for loyalty and sacrifice. This follows the shift in ISIS’s operational focus from administering a physical caliphate to inspiring attacks locally and abroad. Knowing exactly what types of messages and narratives are being circulated in ISIS propaganda has important implications for understanding the psychology of terrorism, radicalization, securitization, and counterterrorism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".