Islamic State, Biopolitics and Media Governmentality

This book analyses the Islamic State's (IS) media and governance strategy from a critical media and cultural studies perspective. It deploys Deleuze and Guattari's concept of assemblage and Foucault's theories of dispositif (dispositive, apparatus) and biopower to understand the ways in which IS governed its subjects during the tenure of its so-called caliphate. This theoretical triangulation is used to situate the group as more than just a terrorist organisation, and rather as a more amorphous force with proclivities towards governance. It also includes an analysis of globally fluid and conjunctive terrorist strategies executed through media, governance, and conduct, as part of and produced by IS's dispositif, which manifests in the group's epistemology, discourse, and social ontology. To analyse these processes, this book deploys a dispositif analysis of official IS administrative documents, media produced by the group's English-language media wing (Al-Hayat Media Center), and IS Twitter activity, including the use of nonhuman bots. In doing so, it seeks to reveal the resonance between IS's media and governmental discourses, develop dispositif theory, and argue for more context-specific formulations of biopolitics. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, social theory, media theory, and international relations.