Lethal Words: An Integrated Model of Violent Extremists’ Language

Abstract

Violent extremists’ communications regularly yield lethal consequences. Yet despite this importance, no clear framework yet exists that exposes in a coherent way the various markers of violent extremist language. We construct a theoretical model of violent extremists’ language, integrating and refining existing approaches from different academic fields into a comprehensive account of its semantic content and structure. We evidence the empirical accuracy of this model by applying on the magazines of two ideologically different extremist groups (ISIS and US National-Socialist Movement) a bespoke computational text analysis method revealing the specific connections between the nouns, verbs, and adjectives of violent extremist corpora identified in our theoretical model.