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Peer Reviewed Scholarship

ISIS’s Euro-American Fighters: Western Failures and the Narratives of Denial

This article centers on the influx of Western fighters joining ISIS and locates its root causes in systemic and structural forms of alienation, discrimination, and Islamophobia. In Western discourse, understanding this phenomenon is characterized by a sense of denial that limits the interpretive paradigms to one of two approaches: either a racial discourse that confines the debate to antagonistic minoritized citizens with ambiguous loyalties and an inherent vulnerability for radicalism, or the powerful “glamour” of ISIS’s propagandist spectacles that western media cannot dispel.

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Threat of the Downtrodden: The Framing of Arab Refugees on CNN

After September 11, 2001 Arabs and Muslims became the topic of interest for the global media, drawing attention from news outlets worldwide. Recently, the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) along with civil wars in the Arab region have forced hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens, particularly from Syria and Iraq, to flee their homelands. The resulting refugee crisis drew substantial attention and debate. Therefore, studying the framing of Arab refugees and asylum seekers in the global media is of notable significance, especially in connection to ISIS, the war on terrorism, and the upheaval in the Middle East.

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Social Media in Syria’s Uprising and Post-Revolution Libya: An Analysis of Activists’ and Blogger’s Online Engagement

Masudul Biswas and Carrie Sipes perform a comparative content analysis of Twitter and Facebook posts from a sample of Syrian and Libyan activist groups. By considering online content in the context of post-revolution Libya and the continuing upheaval in Syria, the authors shed new light on online activist agenda-setting. They find that while social media is used as a tool to maintain and expand momentum during revolution, in a post-revolution climate the same media serves as a venue for idea-sharing and political discourse.

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