It’s just (ideo)logical: the narrative architecture of violent extremist manifestos

In today’s digital world, violent extremist manifestos have become powerful artifacts of radicalization. Scholars have typically focused more on what manifestos say – the overt content – and less on how it is said. This means that existing research effectively illuminates the ideological beliefs, values and attitudes projected in the texts, but tells us little about how such texts fashion a collection of ideas into ideologies. Combining literature from ideology studies with literary studies, this paper offers fresh insight into this process, analyzing manifestos’ underlying structures to investigate whether and how those structures contribute to the communication of extremist ideology. Through analysis of violent extremist manifestos published online between 2015 and 2025, this paper reveals that violent extremist manifestos in the digital era transform ideas into ideologies through romantic narrativization. There is a common narrative structure which enables disparate ideas to coalesce and cohere into ideologies even in the absence of clear doctrinal consistency. The transformation from ideas to ideology is crucial for understanding how ideologies projected in manifestos are textually reproduced which may have implications for understanding radicalization. This research, therefore, advances knowledge of extremist texts and contributes toward the wider literature on extremist ideologies.