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Based on the premise that terrorism is essentially a message, Terrorism and Communication: A Critical Introduction examines terrorism from a communication perspective-making it the first text to offer a complete picture of the role of communication in terrorist activity. Through the extensive examination of state-of-the-art research on terrorism as well as recent case studies and speech excerpts, communication and terrorism scholar Jonathan Matusitz explores the ways that terrorists communicate messages through actions and discourse. Using a multifaceted approach, he draws valuable insights from relevant disciplines, including mass communication, political communication, and visual communication, as he illustrates the key role that media outlets play in communicating terrorists’ objectives and examines the role of global communication channels in both spreading and combating terrorism. This is an essential introduction to understanding what terrorism is, how it functions primarily through communication, how we talk about it, and how we prevent it.

Terrorism as a Communication Process: Tactics

After reading this chapter, you will be able to

  • explain terrorism as a dynamic, two-way communication process between a sender (the terrorist) and a receiver (the audience);
  • discuss persuasion as the objective of terrorism; and
  • identify and describe three forms of terrorism as a communication process: social noise, the signature method, and the conduit metaphor.

Communication: Definition

Communication is the act of conveying a message from a sender to a receiver. The study of communication in Western culture has a history of approximately 2,500 years and is reported to have originated in Greece with Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics. For Aristotle, the process of communication involved the speaker, the speech act, the audience, and a purpose. He contended that all communication is persuasion and ...

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