Selling Utopia: Understanding Non-Violent Jihadist Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism Strategy

Research on ISIS recruitment propaganda has emphasized themes rather than how extremist participation is rendered intelligible, legitimate, and meaningful. This article examines the 2014 video There Is No Life Without Jihad, in which foreign fighters frame migration, sacrifice, allegiance, and martyrdom as religious obligations and solutions to alienation. Using Quentin Skinner’s interpretive approach, the study reads the video as a mediated resource of deviant socialization. It shows how ISIS constructs an alternative normative order in which violent jihad becomes learnable through exemplary models, morally defensible through religious reclassification, and compatible with identities organized around brotherhood, honor, purpose, and transcendence.