Multimodal Terrorist Recruitment: How multimodal discourse manipulates bicultural identities for radicalization purposes

This work provides a multimodal discourse analysis applied to a very pressing topic: how language in both its verbal and visual forms can be manipulated to effectively promote radicalization and subse quently encourage extremist behavior and terrorist acts. The use of the English language to address social identity needs and cultural values for the scope of terrorist recruitment has proven to be very effective in the English-speaking world, as demonstrated by the activities of ISIS from 2014-2017. The implementation of social networks, the dark web and highly trained recruiters proved extremely effective as evidenced by the large numbers of foreign fighters that travelled to join the ISIS caliphate during the heyday of ISIS. Attractive texts directly addressed to identity needs and motivational cultural values were developed and disseminated all over the internet, through YouTube, Facebook, In stagram and others, targeted at young people in the West. Much analysis of ISIS recruiting techniques has been carried out ex post facto, but the danger of radicalization not just by foreign terrorist groups but by hate groups and domestic terrorists makes this study applicable in real time. The topic has been narrowed down to analyze the case of the ISIS foreign fighters, but the principles should be applicable to other groups and recruitment campaigns.