Interpreting Insurrectionary Corpora: Qualitative-Quantitative Analysis of Clandestine Communiqués

The interpretation of texts emanating from clandestine political actors is an undertheorized area in the study of social movements. Certainly, descriptive accounts of such movements are common, yet scholarship focusing on developing an analysis of the multitude of texts these networks produce is rare. While a great deal of edited volumes exist that compile communiqués, manifestos, and other ephemera for analysis,¹ very few volumes take the space to rhetorically and linguistically interrogate these spaces for elements of discourse. In the cases where this approach is adopted, the subject is typically restricted to military-styled nonstate actors,² or based more in the analysis of framing or narrative theory.³ In an attempt to correct for this, the following study is focused on the lexical analysis of written texts penned by anonymous, clandestine cells employing illegal direct action for the purposes of sociopolitical contestation.

The subsequent analysis is focused on the study of communiqués sourced from the “informal international translation and counter-information network” to survey the political tendency loosely termed “insurrectionary anarchism.”⁴ This tendency is most often associated with frequent attacks by underground cells claiming responsibility through a variety of monikers, most centrally the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI), International Revolutionary Front, and the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF). These networks, while emerging in Western Europe around the millennium, have since deterritorialized, replicating their franchises and affiliated cells around the globe. Scholarship on these networks has been limited,⁵ and though a complete chronology or incident-based historical record of this tendency is beyond the scope of this study, through the analysis of written communiqués, these networks have produced and claimed responsibility for nearly 1,000 attacks in 36 countries from 2008 to 2014.⁶ Most of these attacks come in the form of vandalism (e.g., graffiti, gluing of locks, breaking of windows), sabotage, arson, or the use of small-yield explosive devices aiming to damage property. These networks, after carrying out their attacks, typically post claims of responsibility on a number of redundant Internet blogs. It is the content of these blogs that constitutes the data for this study.

Corpus Linguistics for the Analysis of Political Text

From among the wider network of insurrectionary communiqué repositories, four prominent websites were selected,⁷ and their contents (excluding content that was not a claim of responsibility) were compiled into corpora. These texts were copied verbatim and standardized for machine readability. This method was chosen in an attempt to create a “full text corpus” focused on the insurrectionary community,⁸ and the websites were selected for their recurring prominence and function as nodes of redistribution. Following the compilation of these communiqués from the aforementioned hubs, the collected texts were analyzed with the aid of AntConc, a corpus linguistics suite designed to identify patterns in large blocks of written text. Corpus linguistics is a child of Speech Act Theory of the 1960s,⁹ and in modernity, it utilizes the processing power of computers to perform content analysis of “real-life language use” through the quantitative excavation of patterned word choice.¹⁰ The methodological aims of corpus linguistics are to look beyond how language works through relationships such as grammar and syntax and instead examine why a specific social group deploys words in a temporal and context-specific manner. Corpus linguistics’ focus is thus not the English language itself (or any other language for that manner) but the usage of that language by a social actor—“to unearth socially meaningful interpretations that can then be listed to do socially transformative work.”¹¹ The analysis and interpretation of these texts via corpus linguistics presumes that the writers crafted such pieces with intentionality, through linguistically “meticulous preparation.”¹² The “non-spontaneous, planned and edited nature” of written texts make them ideal for analysis.¹³ In this manner, word choice can be understood as intentional, nonincidental, and as expressive as the writer can produce. It is precisely because of this manner of speech construction that the object of the communiqué was selected for analysis.

The...