Jihads Digital Frontier: Mapping the Aesthetic Practices of Jihadist Militant Groups in the Sahel Conflict

This project aims at a comprehensive mapping of the media landscape of the two major Jihadist organisations in the Sahel Conflict: JNIM and ISSP. Since the start of the conflict over a decade ago, both groups have developed extremely sophisticated media operations and have produced a huge number of often highly sophisticated videos. That said, this extensive record has gone under-analysed in the literature on the conflict. Exactly why these two have developed these massive operations, which are far more complex than those of other, non-Jihadist militant groups, is unclear. Opportunities for dissemination are complicated by a variety of factors - weak telecommunications infrastructure, myriad ethno-linguistic divides, and high rates of illiteracy, all encourage a skepticism that our existing understanding of the media operations of their parent organisations, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, can be deployed here - instead necessitating a rich accounting of the existing aesthetic traditions of the region, their translation into the aesthetic project of global Jihadism, and the individual creative practices which produce these myriad works. This project thus aims to collect and analyse the aesthetic output of these organisations in order to broader our understanding of what they mean -pushing beyond the usual focus on their capacity to recruit in order to better grasp the complex aesthetic forces that these works represent.