The Dispositif of Terror: Islamic State, Biopolitical Governance, and the Digital Conjuncture

This thesis re-conceptualises contemporary articulations of terrorist governance through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (D&G herein) concept of assemblage, and Michel Foucault’s theories of dispositif (dispositive, apparatus) and biopower. It unpacks the media and governmental strategies of the group known as the Islamic State (IS) by teasing out the resonance between the group’s internal administrative processes, external media output, and its supporters’ social media discourse. A consideration of IS’s social ontology as an assemblage, and their terroristic conduct through Foucault’s dispositif, seeks to problematise the group as more than just a terrorist organisation. Rather, an analysis of globally fluid and conjunctive terrorist strategies executed via media, governance, and conduct, as part of and produced by a dispositif, accounts for intersections of social power, epistemology, production, circulation, function, a/effects, and the techno-discursive moment from which the group emerge and reside. Taking both media and administration as my objects of study, I consider how IS’s articulations of terror, in terms of media and governance, constitute what Foucault called a dispositif. That is, to what extent was IS’s media and governmental strategy, and its implementation, composed of ‘a heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’? (Foucault 1980, p. 194). I argue that to understand the group more holistically, as well as how contemporary terrorist groups produce subjects through local and global concentrations of governance, an analysis of both their administration and media is necessary. To achieve this, I conduct a dispositif analysis (Jäger & Maier 2009, 2016; Caborn 2007). A dispositif analysis, essentially a tripartite discourse analysis of texts, actions, and objects, has a pronounced focus on the materiality of discourse ...