ISIS’ Dabiq Communicative Strategies, NATO and Europe. Who is Learning from Whom?

The chapter discusses ISIS’ communicative strategies as a memetic activity, where terminologies, discourses and narratives of the “enemy”, i.e. the West and Europe, are re-appropriated and spun in order to satisfy the organisation’s own needs. Analysts agree that ISIS employs specific skills in managing the various media available and that it can articulate message production with a distinguished “western” style. This supports the impression that its public diplomacy follows memetic criteria. The paper firstly carries out a quantitative analysis of Dabiq, it then analyses the inconsistencies of its self-narrative compared with the addressees’ ones. Thus, it will be possible to reverse engineer the memetic processes at work and to discover who learns from whom in this “game of mirrors” where codes are appropriated and legitimised. The present discussion, comparing the ISIS narrative to the specific NATO doctrine on InfoOps and PsyOps, claims the presence of exogenous elements in the structuring of the message. These generate an informative process that is neither a narrative nor a counter-narrative, but rather a narrative against a specific enemy: Europe. Dabiq discourses of/on Europe are thus marginalising where NATO is concerned. Furthermore, the old continent is considered as an enemy/ally of the USA, and thus the target of an asymmetrical narrative that leverages on continental political weaknesses and, in both cases, with a deep impact on European public opinion.