A role for genre in the constitution of a terrorist organization

Abstract Schmid and De Graaf (1982) famously claimed that terrorism is communication in and of itself, amplified by the news media. In this sense, the media and their products can be seen as constitutive of terror groups as organizations. Communiques offer an illustrative case study of such a function, achieved through their regularity of form as a genre of terrorist communication. After introducing the communique as an object of focus, this article combines perspectives from Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) and Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) to read the communique as a constitutive communication object. We use 10 internal ISIS in Iraq and a-Sham (ISIS) media documents as context to suggest how the communique genre reflects the attention ISIS gave to the control of communication to achieve organizational outcomes. Using CCO, we argue that these ISIS media documents show at least implicit awareness of the constitutive function of communication and the need for regulating that communication via genre. After analyzing the ISIS media documents, we return to the communiques to interpret the regularities of the genre considering the organization structure they appear to support.