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Rhetorics of Radicalism ∗ Rhetorics of Radicalism ∗ Daniel Karell Michael Freedman Division of Social Science Department of Political Science New York University Abu Dhabi Massachusetts Institute of Technology June 22, 2019 For published version, see American Sociological Review, 84 (4), 2019. ∗The authors thank Reza Hussaini, Wasim Janjua, Majid Mohammadi, Abdul Rahim, and many others who helped make data collection in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan productive and safe. We also thank Ewaz Ali Bahrami, Jason Chu, Kevan Harris, Anand Gopal, Haseebullah Juma Khan, Sebasti´anRojas Cabal, Brandon Stewart, Katherine Stovel, Alex Strick von Linschoten, Muhammad Usman, and Azhar Yerzhanova for their assistance and insights throughout the process of analyzing and writing. We greatly benefited from advice offered by Elisabeth Anderson, Paul DiMaggio, Noam Gidron, Steven Pfaff, Malte Reichelt, and Blaine Robbins during the later stages of the project. Finally, we are indebted to three anonymous reviewers and the editors for suggestions that were of immense help in furthering our study. Any remaining errors and omissions are our responsibility. This project was supported by Daniel Karell's research grant from New York University Abu Dhabi's Division of Social Science and the Fung Fellowship at Princeton University's Institute for International and Regional Studies. Michael Freedman received support from the Israel Institute during the project. Daniel Karell, the corresponding author, can be reached at [email protected] and PO Box 129188, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. 1 Abstract What rhetorics run throughout radical discourse, and why do some gain prominence over others? The scholarship on radicalism largely portrays radical discourse as opposition to powerful ideas and enemies, but radicals often evince great interest in personal and local concerns. To shed light on how radicals use and adopt rhetoric, we analyze an original corpus of more than 23,000 pages produced by Afghan radical groups between 1979 and 2001 using a novel computational abductive approach. We first identify how radicalism not only attacks dominant ideas, actors, and institutions using a rhetoric of subversion, but also how it can use a rhetoric of reversion to urge intimate transformations in morals and behavior. Next, we find evidence that radicals' networks of support affect the rhetorical mixture they espouse, due to social ties drawing radicals into encounters with backers' social domains. Our study advances a relational understanding of radical discourse, while also showing how a combination of computational and abductive methods can help theorize and analyze discourses of contention. Key terms: Radicalism; Textual analysis; Computational abductive analysis; Sociology of the future; Afghanistan 1 Introduction Scholarship on radicalism depicts a heterogeneous landscape of radical messages. Radicals may, for example, champion the protection of vanishing traditions (Calhoun 2012), or express intolerance of existing social and political systems (Nasr 2005; Achilov and Sen 2017). Some radicals may justify violence against innocents (Moskalenko and McCauley 2009; Snow and Cross 2011; Rink and Sharma 2018) and glorify death (Roy 2017), whereas others may pursue nonviolent extra-institutional action (Dalgaard-Nielsen 2010; Borum 2011; Bartlett and Miller 2012; Beck 2015). Yet, despite recognizing this diversity, the literature subsumes radical ideas and arguments, or rhetorics, under a single broad notion: radicalism entails opposition against hegemonic sociopolitical systems or pow- erful people, organizations, and institutions in a particular context (e.g. Goldstone, Gurr, and Moshiri 1991; Ferree 2003; Calhoun 2012; Bartlett and Miller 2012; Beck 2015; della Porta 2018). In an empirical parallel, the kind of radical that has lately attracted the most attention, so-called global jihadists, are nearly always portrayed as advocates of violence against external enemies (e.g. Benjamin and Simon 2002; Gam- betta and Hertog 2016; Walter 2017b; Rink and Sharma 2018; Mitts 2019). However, recent events suggest radicalism may comprise a range of rhetorics. The Islamic State, for instance, displayed a fixation with intimate matters (Tezc¨urand Besaw 2017), including the notorious policing of sexual identity (Saul 2015), women's dress (Callimachi 2016), and smoking (Callimachi 2017). What common rhetorics might run throughout radical discourse? Because the scholarship on radicalism does not primarily focus on the nature of its discourse|unlike recent studies of nationalism and populism (Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016; Bonikowski and Gidron 2016; Brubaker 2017)|our goal is to shed new light on the rhetorics of radicalism, as well as the dynamics of their usage. To do so, we adopt a relational approach, paying particular attention to the interplay between themes in radicals' writings and how this interplay is shaped by radicals' social relationships. Specifically, we examine two questions. First, which, if any, rhetorical patterns help constitute radical discourse? Second, why do radical groups adopt one rhetorical pattern, or a mixture of patterns, instead of another? We identify and conceptualize radicals' rhetorics through a novel use of computational textual analysis in the task of theorizing. We call this approach computational abductive analysis. Abductive computational methodology \defamiliarizes" the concept under study to expose its puzzling aspects. Resolving these puzzles through an iterative movement between a widening body of empirical material and further analyses can help generate or refine conceptual frameworks, thereby laying the foundation for new theories (Tavory and Timmermans 2014). Our computational abductive analysis builds on the radicalism scholarship, our knowledge of the empirical case, and a computational analysis of an original corpus of more than 23,000 pages published by radical groups operating in and around Afghanistan between 1979 and 2001. To the best of our knowledge, this corpus, comprising documents we collected in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan and introduce here, is the 3 most extensive dataset of radical groups' writings compatible with computational methodologies.1 Previewing our findings, we first identify two ideal types of radical rhetoric. A rhetoric of subversion evokes an ongoing, historical-scale fight against powerful enemies external to radicals' immediate commu- nity. In contrast, a rhetoric of reversion turns the rhetorical gaze inward, drawing on notions of everyday morality in the personal and local spheres to uproot undesired elements from among radicals' close social context. This kind of rhetoric reveals an intimate form of radicalism|a kind often overlooked by common conceptualizations of radicalism as being pitted against despised outsiders. The second part of the article examines why radical groups adopt more of one rhetorical type than another. Drawing on insights into the interdependency of relationships, social domains, and discourse (e.g., Bearman 1993; White 1995; Mische and White 1998; White 2008; Mische 2011), the analysis offers evidence that groups' ties to supporters affect which rhetoric they deploy. We conclude with a discussion of our studys contributions to the scholarship on radicalism and, more generally, discourses of contention e.g., nationalism, populism). Specifically, we highlight how rhetorics of subversion and reversion both construct a discursive boundary of futurity (Mische 2009; 2014): some prevailing and powerful ideas, ways of life, individuals, groups, and institutions are rhetorically cast as not belonging in the future. Conceptualizing other discursive boundaries of exclusion can, in turn, help advance our theorization of contentious discourse, including ways these discourses split, overlap, and merge. As a whole, our study begins to chart a relational understanding of radical discourse by examining how relationships and boundaries affect the development and adoption of radical concepts, ideas, and language. 2 Patterns of radical rhetoric Social scientists seeking to discover unknown concepts and themes in large textual corpora increasingly use unsupervised machine learning techniques|most commonly, topic models|to identify patterns of word usage (e.g., Quinn, Monroe, Colaresi, Crespin, and Radev 2010; Grimmer and Stewart 2013; Miller 2013; Mohr and Bogdanov 2013; Roberts, Stewart, Tingley, Lucas, Leder-Luis, Kushner Gadarian, Albertson, and Rand 2014; Light and Odden 2017). This inductive analysis can be combined with expert knowledge, a deep engagement with source material, and other automated content analysis techniques to yield novel and compelling inferences, an approach recently described as computational grounded theorizing (Nelson 2017). However, an inductive approach is less applicable when researchers come to the data already having some idea of the direction in which hypotheses, arguments, and theories may develop. When ethnographers find themselves in such circumstances, they often undertake abductive analysis: identifying surprising findings in light of prevailing arguments, and reasoning through what makes them unexpected to generate a newly refined theory with greater explanatory power (Tavory and Timmermans 2014). Similar to ethnographers familiar with arguments relevant to their field site, we have a wealth of scholarship on radicalism to draw 1 For a similar kind of corpus consisting of writings by individual Arabic-speaking jihadists, see Nielsen 2017. 4 from, as well as literature on and experience with
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