Sociology 3363F/G Chapter Notes - Chapter S15: Ummah, Sayyid Qutb, Ibn Taymiyyah
23 Jun 2018
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Violence in the name of god? A Framing process approach to the Islamic State in Iraq in Syria
Intro
-ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) emerged in 2005 and conquered Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city
-Uses the Social Movement Theory to explore ISIS’s ideological interpretation and use of group’s ideological
justification to use violence
oInvestigate the relations between the structural conditions of ISIS emergence, the group’s current
interpretative process and construction of its environments as the conditions of its ideology and the
justification of violent actions it derives therefrom
-ISIS consciously and strategically constructs a collective action frame which identifies cases of Sunni Muslim
grievances, generates a collective identity and emphasizes the possibility for change and need for violence
-Islamic symbolism is an interpretive lens that explains, and assigns meaning to its soicio-political social context
and thereby grants moral justifications for ISIS violent actions
ISIS as an Islamic Social Movement
-SMT interested in Islamic activism (the mobilization of contention to support Muslim causes) such as social-
political grievances
-Social movements include ‘collective actions rooted in Islamic symbols and identities, explicitly political
movements that seek to establish an Islamic state
Defining and Linking Framing Processes, Ideology and Collective Violence
-Framing processes generate mental structures or collective action frames – incorporates cognitive processes,
culture identity, values and beliefs, emotions and ideological concepts as factors that shape social movements and
their collective activities
-Social movements assign meaning to and interpret relevant events and conditions thru collective action frames
-Framing processes become conscious strategic efforts to fashion shared understanding of that world and that
legitimates and motivates collective actions and de-legit opponents
-Frames need three core tasks
oIdentify an issue and assign a responsibility for its causes to another (diagnostic framing)
oProvide a solution to the issue and the necessary strategies to arrive at the target (prognostic framing) and
elaborate a call to arms or rationale for the action (motivational framing)
oFraming is a process of building a collective us and them
-Ideas, values or beliefs as elements of framing activity are often subsumed under the term ideology: set of beleifs,
values, principles, attitudes and/or ideals with a profound political contention
oFunctions are to explain, organize and interpret the socio-political environments by establishing norms
and values to integrate individuals into a community, to motivate actions and legit them
oIdeology pursues the aim of justifying contesting or changing social and political arrangements and
processes of a political community
-Ideology links to violent collection action – violence is a tool to achieve the goal defined in the established
ideology
-Collective action tends to be violent when people identify with others in the group and is the way to confront the
other
-Tilly says collective violence:
oSocial interaction that inflicts physical damage on persons/objects and involves two perps of damage and
results at least in part from a coordination among people who perform the damaging acts
-Ideology is critical for framing processes and required for any groups emergence in its functional organization
and political activity
-Frames usually justify extra-institutional political action to generate social change, they propagated ‘temporary,
campaign-specific beliefs which are ‘instrumentally pluralistic
-Ideologies promote deep-rooted values and beliefs that last longer in time intending to fix meaning while refuting
alternatives
oTend to be broad in scope and long the duration than frames
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