Ideology without Borders? Violent Discourses in the Age of the Internet

Abstract

Many authors agree that discourses promoted by clandestine violent organizations result from the interactions of macro-narratives with local claims, values, traditions, symbols, and memories. At a time when the Internet erases boundaries and helps create virtual links between unrelated groups, how might we reevaluate the influence of broader narratives on the constitution of violent clandestine organizations’ discourses? This panel addresses four interrelated processes that shape such discourses in the age of the Internet: 1) the mechanisms of diffusion and circulation of broader left-wing, right-wing, and jihadist ideologies; 2) the adaptation of these macro-discourses to different contexts, organizational types and differing objectives, and their role in justifying the use of violence; 3) the competition between different identity claims that emerge from these processes within the same organizational or ideological family; and 4) the changes in discourses, both at the local and global levels, that result from these diffusion-adaptation-competition processes.

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