VIDEO: Narrative War: Understanding ISIS

“Narrative War: Understanding ISIS” Lt. Col. Brian Steed, PhD.- USArmyCGSC 

This is a presentation given to students and faculty at the US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on 31 January 2019. For information and biography on the presenter, Brian L. Steed, please refer to the website www.narrativespace.net

In 2014, the city of Mosul fell to a battalion sized group of fighter in six days. ISIS used engagement, social media, YouTube videos, and grievances of Sunni disempowerment to fuel this amazing success. In the same year, the Russians seized the Crimean Peninsula with little green men and began an assault on the Eastern portions of the Ukraine initiated by gangs and thugs. These are examples of narrative war – conflict where narrative use and manipulation is the decisive operation and organized conventional military violence is a shaping operation. Such is the present and near future of war.

This presentation explains narrative war through an understanding of ISIS. Who and what it is? When and why did it form? And, how does it use maneuver in the narrative space to effectively achieve conflict success against significantly more powerful opponents?

Understanding ISIS is only a tool to developing essential understanding for present and future opponents whether they be non-state, sub-state, post-state, or peer or whether the conflict be counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, or large-scale combat operations.

From Dr. Ajit Maan, PhD., Professor of Practice at Arizona State University and Founder & CEO of Narrative Strategies:

• Narratives have everything to do with identity, behavior, and how we process information.
• Foundational narratives tell us who we are supposed to be (identity) in relation to those narratives, how we are supposed to behave and how we are supposed to process info. 
  • Example: two people from different cultural narrative backgrounds can see the exact same event from the same perspective and can oftentimes come back and report completely different or at least various interpretations of that event, even when they are looking at the same information.
    • That’s not because the information is different, its because the way they process information/ data into their brains is different and the reason it is different is because they have different narrative backgrounds so we all filter in and out info, how we do it is how we have been trained to do it, largely an unconscious training
    • So I may simply dismiss some background noise and not even be conscious of it whereas someone else from another culture can hear the exact same auditory input and be very alarmed by it- different cultural backgrounds, different narrative environments
    • So when we think about narrative and conflict we are NOT talking about information conflict, we are talking about the way info is processed
      • We are looking less at info, data, and statistics, information in the environment, and we are looking more at the different ways in which people process that information

Id like to make a distinction, an important one, between narrative conflict and other kinds of conflict.

• These days we are hearing a lot about ideological battle about political battle, about information warfare about like wars, narrative conflict is different than those forms of conflict
• Narrative conflict is conflict / an attack on identity
  • An attack on the way information is processed that means the meaning the info is given
  • Often times military practitioners like IO guys, information operation types, focus on means of messages rather than on stories that trigger and refer to narratives
  • That’s problematic in itself, but its particularly problematic when the audience is not familiar with the narrative being referenced by the themes and messages

If there is no common understood narrative basis that a message refers to, then all the audience hears is the message itself and the message itself is just information; information itself is not adequate for influence.

• • • Example: US themes and messages in Afghanistan have been the following
      • The US sent troops to Afghanistan to conduct a war on terror
      • The Taliban are enemies of the people of Afghanistan
      • The Afghan government is legitimate
      • Democracy will benefit the Afghan people
      • The us is technologically superior to its enemies
    • These are examples of themes and messages
      • Each of these themes and messages is objectionable that is its easy to simply reject the claims outright but what if I tell you a story that resonates with a deeply held narrative of Afghan identity that becomes much more difficult to reject.

So the Taliban has been actually much more effective than we have in strengthening national identity by appealing to shared values since they know what they are- shared customs and shared history of expelling foreign influences 

The defense of Islam is a shared foundational narrative that resonates with the Taliban and its audience.

• If the audience can be made to believe that Islam itself is under attack rather than terrorism then they will view events through that lens, the shared identity layer as defenders of Islam and expellers of foreign influence is an important shared element
  • • What the US put forth in Afghanistan in terms of themes and messaging, did not address existent narrative identity of the population we wanted to influence and the challenge for US has been to conduct a narrative analysis not just an analysis of culture, meaning languages and customs and so forth, but an analysis of the narratives that people live by 
      • We need to know what stories they tell about themselves and how those stories are supported or not supported by their foundational narratives that they are born into
        • If we had that information we could…
          •  see exploitable fissures between afghan narratives and taliban stories 
          • tell a narrative that goes deeper than the connection that the taliban has established with Afghan identity
          •  connect our own moral code to that of Pashtunwali (code of honor and tribal code of the Pashtun people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, by which they live)

To learn more about Narrative Warfare—its scientific foundations and its relevance to both everyday life and the work of security professionals—visit Narratives Strategy Journal!

Small Wars Journal is proud to support Narrative Strategies and looks forward to spotlighting more vital work that deepens our understanding of the human condition and its connection to narrative. Explore the tags on this post to discover more insightful content on narrative warfare.