“The Terrorist Image: Decoding the Islamic State’s Photo-Propaganda” by Dr. Charlie Winter, reviewed by Dr. Robert J. Bunker of SWJ
C/O Futures Book Review
9 September 2024
“The author of The Terrorist Image, Dr. Charlie Winter, is presently the Chief Research Officer and Co-Founder of ExTrac (which uses AI supported systems to analyze violent extremist data), holds a number of associate fellow and senior research positions with various universities and programs, and is a subject matter expert on the relationship between propaganda and insurgency.[1] The work, derived from his doctoral thesis, utilizes imagery taken from official Islamic State media distribution products. This curated data set comprising many dozens of images (included in the work in glossy black and white form) is taken from over 17,000 photographs collected by the author from his research spanning the 2015-2017 period. While some graphic photographs have been analyzed in the work, the pictures themselves have been omitted. The research behind the book, funded by Facebook, can be considered a unique one-off endeavor and representative of one of the more sophisticated IS narrative (i.e. internally and externally PSYOPs focused) works published to date.”
Dr. Bunker gives his expertise in this compelling review of Dr. Charlie Winter’s book. Click here to view his book review.
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“C/O Futures, LLC is a small business located near to the renowned Claremont Colleges consortium, providing specialized research and analytical consulting and training services that facilitate client knowledge solutions for addressing future socio-political and operational environment shaping and response.
Our corporate mission is to further and protect liberal-democratic values and institutions—both public and private—in the face of the disruptive systemic level change taking place during the transition from the modern to post-modern epochs of human civilization.
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Another client service area pertains to narratives vis-a-vis both constructed realities and cultural norms related to threat groups and the response for deradicalization and counter-narrative purposes. A final service area concerns the process and effects of epochal change pertaining to the national strategic through civilizational levels of global activities and interactions. All C/O Futures, LLC research is influenced through the lens of the epochal change construct developed in the later 1980s (by one of its principals) in order to preserve liberal-democratic values and institutions through the global civilizational transition.”
