The Terrorist in the Feed: Understanding the New Economy of Terror
We no longer fight wars. We stream them.
Modern conflict has shifted shape—not merely in weaponry or geography, but in feeling. Increasingly, the battlefield is a narrative. And those who wage war in its shadowed corners, be they jihadists, lone wolves, and foreign proxies, understand this all too well.
This is the essence of liminal warfare, a term crystallized by counterinsurgency expert Dr. David Kilcullen to describe forms of conflict that operate beneath the threshold of conventional war. These are battles fought not in declared theatres, but in the informational fog between peace and open violence. In this liminal zone, war is unclaimed, unattributed, and asymmetric. It’s not about the territory you hold but the attention you hijack. A new generation of terrorists have demonstrated that they have embraced this dynamic.
Liminal warfare is not new—but its tools are. Today’s insurgents, terrorists, and hybrid actors do not merely fight to kill; they fight to be seen, and more crucially, to be shared. Mass media, especially the digital, mobile, algorithmic kind, has become both battlefield and weapon. The meme, the livestream, the viral clip: these are no longer collateral to political violence; they are constitutive of it.
The Logic of ISIS’ Aestheticized Violence
One of the most chilling expressions of this was the Islamic State’s digital campaign of aestheticized brutality from 2013 – 2017.
The function of ISIS’ execution videos, such as the killings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, functioned not merely as propaganda or deterrence, but as performative acts of sovereignty. These carefully scripted spectacles converted individual acts of death into visual dramas of humiliation, vengeance, and legitimacy. The hostages’ orange jumpsuits evoked Guantánamo; their scripted confessions accused America of its own crimes; and their beheadings, conspicuously edited offscreen, invited a visceral audience ritual of suspense, complicity, and horror.
ISIS wasn’t just killing. It was staging sovereignty, casting itself as the new arbiter of life and death in a post-Westphalian, digitally mediated Caliphate. Understanding this, and not inscribing our own western logic, is the key to understanding the alternate logic of modern terror groups. The goal wasn’t just recruitment or terror, though it achieved both. The goal was inversion; to symbolically emasculate the West, to portray the United States not as a hegemon, but as a paper tiger—impotent, criminal, and absurd. Here, what mattered was not the battlefield, but the framing.
The Weaponization of Attention
Scholars have coined the term ‘digital time’ to describe the accelerated, affective temporality in which these videos circulated. The endless, on-demand replay of brutal images collapses the space between event and response. It forces the viewer to begin ‘thinking less and feeling more’, and in doing so, becomes the default mode of online engagement with such groups.
And therein lies the mechanism of modern terror: not just killing, but curating the spectacle of killing; not just shock, but ritualized viewing that creates emotional publics, radicalized identities, and new interpretive communities. The audience becomes part of the performance. This is no longer about mass armies but mass network effects.
The Liminal Mode of Terror
Here, Kilcullen’s concept of liminal warfare becomes key to understanding this phenomenon. Liminal actors—ISIS, stochastic terrorists, proxy saboteurs—thrive in ambiguity. Their violence is often deniable, asymmetric, and decentralized. What ties it together is its ritualistic, media-first logic. Whether it’s the Christchurch shooter livestreaming a massacre like a Twitch streamer, or a domestic extremist posting manifestos as memetic call-to-arms, the pattern holds – violence as virality. Strategy becomes spectacle. Kill counts are tallied in retweets.
In doing so, traditional models of counterterrorism falter. Attribution is obscured and culpability is diluted, leading to the public being saturated by such violent content. The algorithms, indifferent to moral weight, deliver content with the same mechanical efficiency—whether it’s a makeup tutorial or a martyrdom video. In some cases, such content may even be boosted, a concept called ‘Algorithmic Radicalisation’ as its virality attracts attention to online platforms.
We are no longer asking, “Who pulled the trigger?” We are asking, “Who edited the video?”
Toward a New Counter-Terror Methodology
If liminal warfare is the new mode of terrorism, then narrative pre-emption, not just military deterrence, must become part of our strategic response.
The task ahead is twofold:
1. Mapping digital rituals of violence, not merely the actors or ideologies. Understanding how spectacle functions, how it recruits, humiliates, and inverts.
2. Disrupting narrative architectures before they congeal. This means developing counter-narratives that are not only informative but symbolically potent—ones that break the spell of spectacle rather than amplify it through sterile denunciation.
It also means cultivating new forms of public literacy: helping audiences discern the symbolic grammar of online violence, the scripts beneath the shock and the roles we are invited to play. To recognize liminal warfare is to understand that the first strike is often not a bullet but a clip. A viral video. A miscaptioned meme. A livestreamed grievance – these make us, the viewers, both aggregators and multipliers of the terrorist message.
The challenge of our age is not merely defending against the kinetic aftershocks of radicalization. It is recognizing that the war has already begun, perhaps not simply on the battlefield, but in social media and message boards. If sovereignty used to be exercised through territory, today it is often first exercised through screens.
And if we wish to protect what remains of peace, we must learn to read the image like a battlefield—because for many of our enemies, that is exactly what it is.
By Etienne Darcas, Research Fellow, Rise to Peace.
