Challenging the Jihadi Narrative: Interviews of French Prisoners Held in Syria

Introduction

Radical Islam is a "total" phenomenon,¹ with multiple dimensions: sociological, political, economic, urban, anthropological, psychopathological, even technological. In this sense, understanding jihadism and its expansion in the West means delving into the "macro," "meso," and "micro" parameters that shape the process of the transition to radicalism.² These elements can be observed in the conditions of material existence of radicalized individuals (experiences, family, and social background, etc.). They can also be identified in their linguistic outputs when they try to promote, argue, explain, or justify radicalism; hence scholars' interest in the jihadi narrative.

However, narratives as discursive constructions contribute to identity assignments³ and, by doing so, they can become objects of negotiation when embedded in specific communication settings,⁴ for instance, when confronted with specific modes of enunciation, such as social, political, historical, and ideological contexts. In this sense, the jihadi narrative can be negotiated and challenged, even by those who may have embraced it. In this article, we study the discourse of three French jihadi prisoners when interviewed by a journalist for the national channel France 2. Alleged radicals arrested and taken prisoner in Syria, they all aspire to return to France and have requested to be repatriated. We will show that the I-We-They pragmatic stances that forge the very essence of the jihadi narrative are reinvested and redefined by the interviewees, who seek to avoid the "stigma"⁵ of radicality and thus create an enunciative posture that we will designate as "a-radical."⁶ The posture of "aradicality" challenges the existing interpretative schemas that oscillate between radicalization and deradicalization or between radicalization and radicalism. By extricating themselves from this dichotomy, interviewees can lay down the foundations of their persuasion strategy.

Perhaps we should briefly explain here the interest of working on such a micro-corpus, composed of only three cases: on the one hand, there are extremely few interviews of jihadis that are broadcast on mainstream media (the ones studied here seem to be the only ones in France, if we put aside interviews of so-called repentant jihadis); on the other hand, these interviews point to a new problem of social and political dimensions in Europe, that of the return of jihadis to their country of origin. The issue has been openly discussed in France since 2014 but has taken an increasingly important place within the public agenda since 2019. The question is how to accompany and supervise the return of jihadis who have left for Syria or Iraq to the French territory. Within this frame, the use of a micro-corpus necessarily has its limits, but it also has the advantage of setting milestones at the micro-textual and micro-discursive level in order to bring out, in an exploratory manner, emerging linguistic or discursive forms that are potentially revealing of new social phenomena.⁷

In what follows, we will first provide some details on the empirical study, the premises, and the general scope of our research. We will then focus on the discursive dimensions of the jihadi phenomenon in general, and the three pillars of the jihadi narrative (the "I/we/they" pragmatic stances), in particular. Finally, we will demonstrate the importance of these stances as reconfigured by the interviewees in challenging the (conventional) jihadi narrative and the identity assignations that accompany it.

Premises and General Scope of the Empirical Study

Since the end of 2017, a few jihadi prisoners held in Syria have agreed to be interviewed by Western journalists. We focus in this article on three interviews broadcast on the French national channel France 2⁸—also available on YouTube—featuring three suspected jihadis, arrested and taken prisoner in Syria: Abu Abderrahmane, Yassine, and Margaux Dubreuil. These prisoners have requested to be repatriated and judged in France. They were all interviewed by the same journalist, Arnaud Comte. The total duration of the interviews—subsequent to the editorial editing process of France Televisions Group—is 22 minutes and 17 seconds (7'13, 2'42, 12'22, respectively).

The first report was broadcast on 26 October 2017. Eight...