Religious and Political Justifications of Terrorism and Counter-terrorism: Towards a Comparative Analysis of Media Representations in Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Flanders, the UK and the US

Terrorists often justify their acts with religious arguments (9/11, Bali, Madrid trains, London underground, Charly Hebdo, Copenhagen), but they typically give rise to a political justification of counter-terrorism measures (e.g. national security measures, international interventions). Starting from the “semantic network analysis” approach (Kleinnijenhuis ea 1997, Krippendorff 2013) or “core sentence approach” (Kriesi ea 2006, Dolezal ea 2014) in content analysis (anti-)terrorism justifications will be operationalized as mixtures of prototypical justifications (e.g. denial, differentiation, rationalization), that mount up to a network of elementary positive or negative relationships between specific actors and specific issues. The paper discusses (1) whether these elementary positive or negative relationships that underlie specific justifications can be derived from a grammar based automated content analysis of political speeches and media content (in AMCAT, using grammar parsers for German (ParZu), Dutch (Alpino) and English (Stanford Parser), cf. Van Atteveldt 2008) and (2) which justifications dominate in which nation.