Case Study 12.2: The Visual Strategy of ISIS Propaganda (2014–2019)

Propaganda, Power, and Persuasion | Chapter 12

Introduction: A Propaganda Operation Unlike Any Before It

Between 2014 and 2019, the organization that called itself the Islamic State (known variously as ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, or IS) conducted what is widely regarded by communications researchers as the most sophisticated transnational propaganda operation in the history of non-state political violence. It recruited thousands of fighters from dozens of countries. It dominated global news cycles. It generated a visual aesthetic so distinctive that it was recognizable worldwide. It did this with no state resources and against the sustained opposition of governments whose intelligence and communications capabilities vastly exceeded its own.

Understanding how it worked — specifically, how it worked visually — is not an exercise in appreciation or glorification. It is an exercise in recognizing a propaganda operation whose design choices were deliberate, documented, and analytically transparent enough that scholars have been able to reverse-engineer its strategy with considerable precision. That analysis matters not as history alone but as a guide to understanding how visual propaganda techniques that have been applied in different political contexts across this textbook can be combined into a coherent, devastating operational system.

The primary academic sources for this case study are the research of Charlie Winter (Senior Research Fellow, International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College London) and J.M. Berger (scholar of extremism and author of Extremism and co-author of ISIS: The State of Terror), whose work provides the most rigorous documentation of ISIS's media operation currently available.

The Media Infrastructure

ISIS was not improvising its visual communication. It built a media infrastructure.

The al-Hayat Media Center was ISIS's primary production arm for content directed at English-speaking international audiences. It was staffed by recruits with media production backgrounds and operated with equipment, software, and technical standards comparable to commercial broadcast production. The Dabiq magazine (launched 2014) and its successor Rumiyah (launched 2016) were produced to the visual standards of mainstream lifestyle and news magazines — not rough, hand-made propaganda, but polished print publications with professional photography, graphic design, typography, and layout. They were distributed in multiple languages through online channels and circulated widely before platforms developed the moderation capabilities to remove them effectively.

This production quality was itself a propaganda statement. The quality communicated: this is a serious, well-organized, durable entity. This is not a ragtag militia. This is a state — which was, of course, exactly the identity ISIS was claiming. The visual professional quality of the output was inseparable from the political claim it was making. An organization that can produce material indistinguishable from commercial media is an organization with organizational capacity. The medium was, in this case very specifically, a significant part of the message.

The Visual Grammar of ISIS Content

Charlie Winter's analysis of ISIS media output, published through the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, identified six key thematic pillars: mercy, brutality, victimhood, war, belonging, and utopianism. Each pillar had a corresponding visual vocabulary.

The color palette: ISIS visual production used a highly consistent color system. The black associated with ISIS fighters and organizational identity — flags, uniforms, backgrounds — communicated uncompromising authority. Against this black, gold Arabic script communicated religious legitimacy and the heritage of Islamic calligraphic art. The treatment of victims in execution videos was specifically designed in contrast: the desaturated orange of the Guantanamo-style jumpsuits worn by prisoners before executions was a deliberate visual inversion of the American detention system — a form of visual counter-propaganda that appropriated a symbol of American military detention and turned it against its source.

Cinematic production values: Execution videos — the content that generated the most Western news coverage and the most governmental alarm — were produced with multiple camera angles, slow-motion sequences, dramatic musical scoring, and editing rhythms derived from contemporary action film and video game aesthetics. This was not accidental. The target audience for recruitment included young men in Western countries who consumed exactly those aesthetic vocabularies. The visual language spoke to that audience in its native aesthetic register.

This is one of the most analytically important points in the ISIS propaganda case: the organization produced content in the visual language of the culture it was targeting for recruitment. It did not produce foreign-looking material that recruits would have to learn to read. It produced material in the visual idioms that its target audience had been trained, through years of Hollywood film and commercial entertainment, to associate with heroism, adventure, and significance.

Utopia imagery and the two-faced visual strategy: The execution videos were only one face of the ISIS visual strategy. An equally important — and, for Western analysts, initially underappreciated — face was the utopia imagery. ISIS media regularly produced content showing fighters feeding the poor, playing with kittens and children, distributing food in markets, fixing roads, operating bakeries, and living domestic lives in the caliphate's territory. This imagery served a specific recruitment function: it communicated that ISIS was not just a fighting force but a community — a place to belong, a project to build.

J.M. Berger and Jessica Stern, in ISIS: The State of Terror (2015), document the deliberate two-track visual strategy: brutality imagery for the global media cycle (demonstrating power and projecting fear) and utopia imagery for the recruitment audience (demonstrating community and projecting belonging). The same production infrastructure produced both. The emotional registers were entirely different. The strategic function was unified: overwhelm potential recruits' ambivalence by offering both the fantasy of heroic violence and the fantasy of meaningful community, simultaneously.

Wide-angle shots and the landscape of power: ISIS video production consistently used wide-angle cinematography to show fighters moving through large landscapes — desert terrain, urban ruins, open spaces. The visual grammar of this choice is legible through the chapter's framework: placing small figures in large landscapes communicates that the figures control that landscape. The wide-angle shot of fighters moving through territory communicates: this land is ours. The territory is under our authority. The visual claim of territorial control preceded and, in some cases, far exceeded the actual extent of ISIS's territorial control at any given moment — but the image did not require factual accuracy. It required visual credibility.

Why Visual Rather Than Verbal?

ISIS's strategic prioritization of visual content over verbal content was not arbitrary. It reflected the same cognitive logic that the chapter's framework identifies: visual content travels through social media platforms more effectively than verbal content, generates stronger emotional responses, and is remembered longer.

The specific calculations were documented by ISIS itself, in internal communications that were subsequently analyzed by researchers. The organization tracked which content generated the most shares, the most media coverage, and the most recruitment inquiries. Visual content consistently outperformed verbal content on all metrics. Execution videos generated global news coverage that would have cost millions of dollars in advertising had it been purchased. The production cost of a single execution video was a fraction of that. The return on visual propaganda investment was vastly higher than for equivalent verbal content.

Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan's 2017 finding — that false images spread faster and are corrected less effectively than false text claims — applies with modifications to this context: striking visual content spread faster and generated more emotional response than equivalent verbal content, regardless of its factual accuracy. ISIS's visual propaganda operation was a direct application of this principle at scale.

The Recruitment Visual Identity Function

Beyond any specific content, ISIS visual propaganda was constructing a brand identity. The distinctive black-and-gold aesthetic, the specific flag design, the uniform visual production values across all output — these created a recognizable visual identity that functioned exactly as commercial brand identities function: they communicated group membership, shared values, and a coherent self-understanding.

For a potential recruit — typically a young person experiencing social alienation, identity confusion, or a sense of cultural displacement — this visual identity offered something that abstract doctrinal arguments could not: a clear, visually coherent identity to inhabit. Wearing the flag, sharing the content, identifying with the aesthetic was a form of identity adoption available before any commitment to violence was made. The visual identity lowered the first threshold of engagement: you did not need to commit to anything to begin identifying with the brand.

This is not a trivial observation. Research on radicalization pathways (see, e.g., Arie Kruglanski's 3N model: Need, Narrative, Network) consistently identifies identity significance as a primary driver. ISIS's visual propaganda was, at its core, an identity-significance machine. It offered a powerful visual identity to people who experienced their existing identity as inadequate or absent.

Counter-Propaganda Implications

The ISIS propaganda case has profound implications for how counter-propaganda efforts should be designed — and for what cannot work.

Removal is insufficient: Platform removal of ISIS content was and remains important, but content removal alone cannot neutralize a visual identity once it has been established. The underlying visual vocabulary — the aesthetic associations, the identity offer, the emotional charge — persists in the minds of those who have already encountered it. You cannot un-see a visual identity. Counter-propaganda efforts focused only on content removal are equivalent to trying to correct a false visual association through verbal correction: the cognitive mechanism is not fully responsive to the intervention.

You cannot fight a visual identity with its absence: Research on counter-terrorism communication consistently finds that simply removing extremist content or arguing that ISIS's claims are factually false is insufficient. The factual inaccuracies of ISIS propaganda — its claims about territorial control, its promises about life in the caliphate, its framing of its violence as religiously mandated — could be and were documented. This documentation had limited effect. The visual identity's emotional resonance was not substantially diminished by factual refutation of the verbal claims accompanying it.

What is required, the research suggests, is a competing visual identity — alternative visual narratives of Muslim identity, of community, of significance and belonging that offer what ISIS's propaganda offered without the genocidal context. This is substantially harder than content removal, requires sustained investment, and demands the kind of creative and cultural competence that governments and security agencies are not naturally equipped to supply.

The ISIS case as template: While ISIS represents an extreme case of visual propaganda at scale, its design choices are not unique to jihadist extremism. The same principles — professional production quality as a credibility signal; two-track visual strategy (belonging and power); the visual identity offer as a lowered-threshold first engagement; the prioritization of viral visual content over accurate verbal content — are visible in varying forms across the full spectrum of contemporary political propaganda. The ISIS case is extreme in its context and consequences. It is not exceptional in its methods.

Discussion Questions

1. The chapter notes that ISIS production values were "comparable to commercial broadcast production." What does it mean for propaganda analysis when the credibility signals associated with professional production quality (precision, care, resources) are detached from factual accuracy or legitimate authority?

2. ISIS's two-track visual strategy combined brutality imagery with utopia imagery. Why might a single-track strategy — either brutality alone or utopia alone — have been less effective? What does the combination achieve that neither element achieves alone?

3. Consider the argument that Western platforms' coverage of ISIS execution videos — however well-intentioned in terms of news reporting — functioned as free distribution of ISIS propaganda. How should news organizations handle visual propaganda that is itself newsworthy? Is there a responsible middle path between complete suppression and uncritical distribution?

4. The case study argues that counter-propaganda must offer "a competing visual identity." Who should create such an identity, and with what level of government involvement? What are the risks of government-produced counter-propaganda directed at potential recruits within democratic societies?

5. ISIS's visual propaganda was designed in the aesthetic vocabulary of its Western target audience — drawing on Hollywood action film and video game visual idioms. What does this tell you about the relationship between entertainment media aesthetics and political propaganda? Are there entertainment media visual idioms that you recognize in current non-extremist political propaganda?

Case Study 12.2 | Chapter 12 | Part 2: Techniques | Propaganda, Power, and Persuasion